Marketing Insights from Top Search Keywords – Part 1

Before I went into the details of extracting insights, I wanted to talk about how this data must be extracted in order to get an accurate report. This is because product managers need to be careful about the source of the search queries, i.e. SEO/SEM also known as external campaign referrals versus visitor initiated search queries or internal searches. Before looking at the insights, you should first structure this data into two segments as shown in the table below:

Once you’ve figured out the segmentation between searches by visitors on the site and those searches that take place from a URL embedded in your SEM campaign, the insights you extract will be far more useful. Lets see why. From the top search keywords, it will be easy to see which keywords are popular among visitors who search. You must classify keywords based on:

• Product Names
• Categories and Sub-categories
• Stores
• Brands
• Product SKUs
• Product Attributes
• Generic keywords that dont fit into any of the above

The reason to segregate the above is to understand:

• which products are visitors already aware of when they come to your site to search.
• whether they search for exact product names or use keywords which signify a vague awareness of the product.
• which stores/categories/sub-categories visitors are looking for any sort of results.
• which brands have the highest recall on your website through search.
• if they’re searching for exact ISBNs or product numbers, it could be a sign that they’re already aware of exactly what they want.
• what attributes such as colour, dimension, hardback vs. paperback, shape that they look for when searching.

This analysis will give you an insight into the thought process that went into deciding the search keywords. You will be able to use this insight to optimize the search results for the predominant queries. In the next part of this series, I will talk about a few more insights that you can extract from this report to optimize your online marketing.