Every week, people visit your website and tell you exactly what they’re looking for. They type it into the search box, in their own words, with nobody watching.
On most small business websites, that information disappears the moment they press Enter. Nobody reads it, because nobody knows it’s there.
What people type when nobody’s asking
A search box is the most honest feedback you’ll ever get. Nobody is filling in a survey or trying to be polite. They want something, and they’re telling you what it is, in the words they’d use on the phone.
Those words are often not the ones on your website. You might call it “drain maintenance”. They type “smelly sink”. You might list “custom cakes”. They search for “gluten free”. Neither is wrong, but only one of them is how your customers think.
What the searches tell you
Read a month of searches and a few patterns usually jump out:
- Things you offer but haven’t explained. If people keep searching for something you do, and your site doesn’t have a clear page or answer for it, that’s the next page to write.
- Words you should be using. When customers keep using a different word from yours, use theirs. On the page, in the headings, in the answers.
- Things you don’t offer, yet. A steady stream of searches for something you don’t sell is worth a second look. It might be a question to answer (“sorry, we don’t, but here’s who does”), or it might be an opportunity.
- Dead ends. A search that finds nothing is a visitor who leaves. Every one of those is fixable.
How it works on a site we build
Every site we build keeps its searches instead of throwing them away. So you can look at what people actually came looking for, and whether your site gave them an answer.
It’s one of the reasons we don’t treat launch day as the finish line. The search log is how the site tells you what to do next.
What to do with it
Once a month is enough. Read the list, and ask three questions:
- What did people search for most?
- Did they find an answer?
- If not, is it a quick answer (that’s an FAQ) or does it need explaining (that’s a blog post or a page)?
Fix one or two things each month and your site gets steadily better at answering the questions your customers really ask. Which, as it happens, is exactly what search engines (and, by the way, AI chat bots too) are looking for.
Your customers are already telling you what they want. All you have to do is read it.