The truth is it is quite hard to generalize over which is the users’ behavior on the Internet, but, nevertheless, there are tools to analyze and control the way those users search at your website and, especially, the way they find your contents.

The main idea is to implement these two components at your website:

1. Semantic search engine integrated along with the contents of the portal (html pages), which includes a section of salient results, as frequently asked questions.
2. A complete reporting tool, so as to monitor my users’ queries, click-through, trends, etc …

From here on, we should find out which is the percentage of users of your website that use your search engine and which of them search for products. In particular, it should be determined:

• How many of the users looking for products at your search engine end up converting and how many of the users looking for products directly convert.

• What kind of search do users make? Categories? Keywords? Location? Natural language sentences? Where do they search?

• How can you control the data from those searches? What can you do with that information? How can contents be improved?

As for the first matter, if the search engine works properly, the conversion ratio of the visits using the search engine should usually be higher than the one from the rest of the visits. Nowadays it is clear that users have less and less time to look for things and you should offer results as quickly as possible by means of your search engine.

On the other hand, and regarding the second item, I will have to choose a certain strategy or another depending on how my users do their queries, in order to show them the contents they are interested in. For instance, if I detect my users’ queries are basically keywords, a solution to personalize the information would be to start a brief dialogue through the intelligent search engine to gather the rest of important information.

Another important point to bear in mind is to know and detect the pages users are searching at. Or even more important, at which point of the website do users feel “lost” and start using the search engine? We can’t let them down here, because it is not likely they will give you a second chance and the usual thing for users to do is to go back to the Google page where they started their search to start surfing at competitor’s portals.

And then, obviously, after measuring what users search and the way they search for that, I have a powerful tool to:

1. Generate new content for the website, by means of tools that group unanswered users’ queries, so as to cover contents gaps gradually.
2. Improving my SEO and SEM strategies for those products, since my users are giving me real-time clues about the language they are using to look for a product that I would like to position at Google.

Finally, I would like to say goodbye with a motto: The user rules, the user is the king.

More information