Learn More:
Arrange an Evaluation
Flash Demonstration

Contact Us

+44 (0)1293 403636

sales@scl.com

Directions

Optimise Website Content

By Analysis local search

Local search offers a great way of understanding what your potential customers are looking for on your website. And as such provides a useful source of analysis, which can in turn help you to optimise your website content and ultimately increase your conversion rates.

If you know what local searches are being conducted on your website, you can then ensure you have relevant and easy to find content to match those search terms. As a result, users who find what they are looking for are more likely return and to convert, than those visitors who abandon the website through frustration of not being able to locate what they were looking for.

Business Goal

To increase conversions and customer satisfaction by first better understanding what visitors are looking for on the web site that may be unavailable or difficult to find, and then acting on that insight to correct the problems.

Example:

When visitors cannot find what they are looking for on your web site using your primary navigation mechanisms they may resort to the local search capabilities that you offer for help.

Background information and common terminology

Most web sites offer a local search option where visitors can enter keywords in order to locate content pages that relate to what they are looking for on the web site. In the past, most frequently there was a hyperlink from the home page to go to a search form. After launching a search, the results are displayed on a search results page form which the visitor can click to relevant items or issue a new search. Similar insight may also be gained from analysing next-clicks for visitors that are using a site’s site map to find what they are looking for.

Most common challenges

It is difficult to interpret visitors’ intent from analysing their clickstreams alone. Analysing local search is unique in that visitors expressing their intent explicitly using their own words.
Some local search functions do not provide the necessary data to perform analysis as they are either outsourced or do not leave a footprint of the search results inside the log files (neither through query strings nor page tags).
Custom and ad hoc reporting capabilities are required to investigate the resulting actions of visitors following searches. Out-of-box reports provide little information value.

Required information sources

A search results page with a URL query string that includes URL parameters revealing:

The search phrase that the visitor entered and which search results were displayed

The number of results returned

Ideally, if there are more search results than fit on a single page, the page number within the search results that the visitor is viewing

Example:

/search-results.cgi?keyword=copy+paper&results-found=23&page=1

Solutions for measuring visitor’s usage of local search

Affinium Netinsight’s Local Keyword Summary is designed to analyse local search keywords employed by visitors, by extracting URL parameters that you set. Through ad hoc reporting, you can filter the summary in many ways. For example, by filtering on a URL parameter that indicates the number of search results found, the summary can be used to identify keywords with zero or few results returned. This often includes typically misspelled keywords for which you can start offering a workaround to help visitors find their way. You can also apply a filter to restrict the report to those visits where the exit page, i.e. the last page of the visit, is the search results page. This will provide a report of the visitors that abandon your site, unable to fulfil their search.

Affinium NetInsight Report Showing Most Popular Local Keywords

Optimising content with insight revealed from investigating local search

There are countless ways in which you will wish to investigate your local search function using custom and ad hoc analysis. For example:

In order to find out from which of your pages visitors most frequently resort to local search, run a custom Path-To-Summary to the search results page, with the “Max length path” set to two.

In order to find the keywords that visitors are most frequently searching on from each page on your site, define the referrer column of your log files as a Field Parameter in Affinium Netinsight, and then cross-tabulate that custom parameter with the Local Keyword Summary.

If you wish to find out which local keyword searches return too many unhelpful results, you can filter for high values in the URL parameter which shows the page number within the search results on which visitors finally found what they are looking for.

Finally, after making changes and enhancements to your web site pages, you can run ad-hoc trend reports for searches on specific local keywords to monitor whether their usage decreased.