Why you should track search queries on your website

Whether you have a website where you publish blog posts, a business website or a portfolio. If you have a search feature enabled on your website. Then you should also record this in your reports. This can give you unique insights into how visitors interact with your site. And which items you should list first to create. In this article, you'll learn all about the benefits and how to keep track of them.

Many content management systems offer the ability to put search functionality in a widget on your site. For example, in WordPress , you can easily do that in the default functionality. And you can easily do that in many other content management systems as well. In most methods, the searches can then be viewed within Google Analytics or other statistics tools, as long as a record is kept of when a page is visited. For my example in this article, I'm using a Dutch website built with WordPress, and therefore every search query will show up within Google Analytics with the URL suffix: /?s=.

This is a great way to filter your results in Google Analytics. Let's see how you can do this for your website!

Using Google Analytics to display search results

You can, of course, use search results to determine what you want your next article to be about. With a little filtering, you can quickly see what people are searching for. To do this go to Google Analytics and then page views, select the time period you want to see this for. I recommend selecting a number of months for this and then entering /?s= in the filter to show only the pages that were searched for. Some of the results I've seen here on my personal site have been pretty funny to me, but there have also been some that are excellent ideas for new articles. Here are a few that I found funny:

And here's the exact screen where you need to enter this -> Behavior -> Page Content -> All Pages.

The site in question has nothing to do with cars or cheese, by the way. This just shows you how users interact with your site. However, there are some good ideas for articles that can be added, or existing articles that need to be expanded with keywords or information. This will give you more content on the site and allow you to better meet the needs of your visitors.

Pick up and edit additional suggestions

With this simple tip, you can quickly see within Google Analytics what type of search queries are being entered on your website and how you can incorporate them into your website. To take this further, you can also collect suggestions from customers in a list or note. Ask customers for suggestions at the end of an article or in the footer of a website. You can do this by putting a form in the footer, for example. Or a link to the contact page. However, this is a step that not many visitors will take. At MijnHostingPartner.nl we always ask for suggestions to make our knowledge base even better. For some articles, for example, we get suggestions via the online chat on how we can do better. Or via our mail address, which we have set up for this purpose. This way we can better understand what engages customers and visitors, and make our hosting suitable for everyone!

Another powerful tool for this is social media. By signing up your website for Twitter or other social media channels, you'll be in closer contact with your customers. And they can easily add content without taking the extra step of sending an email, creating an account, or filling out a form.

All ways to make the content on your website more relevant to visitors and users. So apply this to your website now to get the most out of it. And make it a success!