What is On-site Search?
On-site or Internal search is the search bar that is positioned at the top of a website, usually with a “search” icon (this is how it looks at the top of our website):-
Visitors who land on your site can use this to ‘search’ what they are looking for on your website (and only on your website) by entering their keyword phrase.
Mega sites such as Amazon.com use the search bar in a very prominent position, right in the middle of the header template and really encourage customers to go straight there, rather than try and find what they are looking for in the menu bar.
As soon as you start to enter keywords into the Amazon.com search bar, suggestions automatically populate the bar, helping you cut to the chase and get you to what you want to buy at lightening speed.
On site search data can provide valuable marketing insights
On a site the size of Amazon, on-site search is there to help people find what they are looking for before going to the menu.
But on smaller websites, on-site search is used as a last resort. If the visitor can’t find what they are looking for in the menu, they use the search bar. The data will probably be telling you what is hidden or missing from your website, but it can also provide other valuable information:
- Help you to improve meta tags and page content to rank higher in Organic search.
- If a specific search term keeps being used by visitors, you may need to build new content around that specific search term
- It can give you keywords insights to use for Paid Search (PPC)
- You could use the keywords to drive content via other channels
- Navigation or information architecture is poor and people can’t find the content they are looking for
- The wording or language is not clear to the customer
- Font is too fancy or the font size is too small making it difficult to read
- The drop down menus are broken or falling away when people try to navigate and click to the page they want
- There is something else broken in the site
How can I set this up in Google Analytics?
- It’s really quick and easy to set up in Google Analytics if you know your way around the tool.
- Go to the Admin on your website profile
- On View, click on View Settings
- Set Site Search trackings to “ON”
- Pop an “s” into query parameter
- Click save
How and where can I see this data?
You’ll be able to see this in your Google Analytics reports in Reporting:-
- Click on Behavior
- Click on Site Search where you will be able to look at the following for the data:
Overview
Usage
Search Term
Pages
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