Mastering Search Analytics

Chapter 1. Introduction to Search Analytics

To define success, you must be able to measure it. To improve upon your success, you must be able to measure it.

Successful search campaigns are won by those who know where they are weak and where they are strong. To be a winner in search, you need to have a solid metrics foundation. There isn’t any magic solution or formula; it comes down to measuring, testing, analyzing, and interpreting data. If you want to improve your search campaigns, you will need to exhaust all the data you have, beginning with the data closest to the user or customer and then expanding out.

Fix and improve what you can control first (your website and the customer experience), then try to fix the larger issues (competing and moving up the rankings by building more links for competitive words). A good approach to working with data is to look at data about the user (words and searches bringing them to your site), data throughout your site (what they are doing on your site), and off-site data (influence over offline actions such as buying a product in a store), and then to tie all of this back to data from the search engine (determining whether the engines are interpreting your site’s content as you feel it should be interpreted). The success of your search campaigns depends on recognizing that you have access to user behavior as well as user intent. The engines try to understand user intent in order to provide the best experience possible and pass this along every ...