Internal Site Search Analysis
-
Hi Folks,
I have about 6,000 internal site search phrases that I want to analyze. There are many variations and duplicates that have similar intent within the data, e.g. Employment, Employment Opportunities, Employment Application.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how I can aggregate the data to get an idea of user intent. There's a lot of long-tail in there.
The data does not come from Google's site search tool. I just have a spreadsheet of the terms and the number of times they were searched.
Cheers!
-
I recommend reading through the entire spreadsheet from start to end and color coding every different intent keyphrase that you come across. Any keyphrases which have identical or very close intent matches should be color coded together.
I do this process manually then I write down every intent variation that I came across. It usually ranges from 10 - 30 different intent buckets. Once I have the pieces of the puzzle, I start piecing together the search funnel for the business.
Who are your known demographics (the personas that your marketing team talks about or your target audience)? Are there intent buckets that do not map to these personas? If yes, then you may be attracting a demographic that is unaccounted for. See if you can figure out who this demographic is.
Is it a worthwhile demographic? Pull out your conversion data. See if you can use the master list of intent buckets to break down the search funnel into a flow chart for each demographic by using the keyphrases mentioned in the first paragraph of this response.
I'm assuming that you have some kind of an employment website like Indeed or Monster.
There are different kinds of personas that I can think about off the top of my head. For example:
1. Employed
2. Unemployed
3. College Student
4. Remote Worker
On 4 different documents, you'd write down the keyphrase intent buckets that you know for a fact are associated with each persona mentioned above. You'll want to use conversion data or pages on your website that are built for specific target audience groups to help you make this decision. For example, if you had a page targeted at a college student, then you could analyze the keyphrases that drive traffic to that page to determine whether your intent bucket is grouped correctly with your correct demographic. You could go one step further by looking at the keyphrases that possibly convert into an email subscriber whom you know is a college student with 100% certainty.
Once you have a bunch of intent keyphrases mapped to each demographic, then you would try to break down the steps. Put yourselves in the shoes of a single demographic and make a decision tree. Write down all the possibilities that one would take online in a sequential set of steps and see if you can map your keyphrases to that list.
There's more but this exercise will get you started and help you figure out the different target audiences that come to your website and highlight their search behavior from keyphrase to keyphrase. It will show you the best points to attack them from an online marketing perspective by tailoring your messaging to distinct steps in the funnel.
Please let me know if this was helpful.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My satellite website is ranking better than my actual site. Why and what to do?
This is our website: www.sauspiel.de and this is the satellite website. As the satellite site has a better ranking for the keyword "schafkopf" since two or three weeks we wonder how this could happen and what would be best to change it or improve the situation. Shall we take down the satellite site, redirect to the "real" site or try to downgrade? And what would you consider to be the (strongest) reason? Any suggestions? Thanks a lot for your help and assessment!
Search Behavior | | sauspiel0 -
Two sites with different URLs
I help organize an ecommerce site for a company that is named after the state that the company was founded in (ex: Florida Pipes). Our programmer is thinking about creating a duplicate site that would have a name that was more location agnostic so people shopping on the site would not think that they may be ordering from far away hence incurring extra shipping charges. He said that the site would only have a different URLs, name and homepage but would link to all of the same stuff that is on the site that is up now. He said that there would be no way to tell (possibly for the layperson) that the two sites were related. Is this a good practice? Would we be penalized in search results for having two URLs linking to the same content? (We are a 30 year old company that ranks very high for our main keyword) Thank you for your input!
Search Behavior | | Winoman0 -
Local search advice?
Some sites i promote limit their services to 50 miles around their location how best is it to optimise their websites. Currently they don't rank very well for non localised search terms but they do very well for term which include their local area. is this something they should be concerned about? Any tips and advice on optimising for local search are greatly appreciated. thanks
Search Behavior | | Bristolweb0 -
Site has taken a fall
I suspect (Although find it hard to beleive!) that a recently aquired link may have affected the rankings of one of my sites for all of it's keywords. Should I get this link removed asap or leave it and see if things recover? To me, it just smacks of un-nautral if the link gets removed straight away.
Search Behavior | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Can we rank as a related search query on a competitor's brand keyword?
One of my clients wanted to know whether it's possible for him to rank as one of the related pages on Google for a brand name of a competitor. I honestly don't know whether it's possible so any ideas whether it's possible and if so, ideas on what can be done is greatly welcome. Thank you in advance. 🙂
Search Behavior | | als0070 -
Drastic Fluctuation in Site Rankings
All, Hope you are having a good day! Recently I had a strange issue with one of my site and I am not sure what might have caused it. I am sure this would be a good place to discuss about it and get some feedback from the elite people in the industry. Here is the problem. Last weekend (On sunday noon) my site which was ranking on Page 1 suddenly dropped its ranking for its main keywords to nowhere, I was panicked to see what was happening and by the end of the day it was slowly coming back and by next morning everything was back. Again on Wednesday noon, the same thing happened. However, this time it din't come up by the next morning. Making it worse, all of my keyword rankings went down from good spots to no where and there was a point when I could no longer see my site. I was worried something might have happened this time and was not sure what could the reason be. On Friday afternoon all the ranking came up better than the previous (which is a very good news for me). At the moment, my site is doing very well and I am really happy about it. I did realize that Google was updating their Algorithm, but this behavior is the strangest I have seen over years. Can someone enlighten me on this peculiar behavior. Is there something wrong with my site or is it a common thing that I have never noticed? I have never done anything blackhat for the site. To be honest, all I have done is some low level link building on the site and the site had some advantage of a re-direct from one my previous site which was doing very well in search engines (I changed it to take advantage of the new domain I had). Your opinions/suggestions are a appreciated.
Search Behavior | | frostmill0 -
Breadcrumb navigation analysis
My client has a website with 160 pages specific to each storefront location. Their strategy was to not have any links to the homepage so they cannot leave that storefront site. I feel it makes sense to create a breadcrumb navigation so the user doesn't have to retype in the url to get back (and provides some internal link juice as well). Has anybody ever came across the same situation or have done testing to know what the bounce rate is? Or possibly pose the right response to convince my client they should in fact have a breadcrumb navigation?
Search Behavior | | danielkamen0