Internal Site Search Optimisation
Improving the accuracy and tolerance of the site's own search box, and mining what people type into it to guide content and merchandising decisions.
Analogy Mental model
Reading the enquiries log at the front desk, which turns out to be a precise record of what customers cannot find and most want to buy.
In practice What you actually do
Confirm query tracking is enabled, then export the report monthly. People who use internal search convert at several times the rate of browsers, so a term appearing there repeatedly without a matching landing page is a direct commercial gap you can close by building the page.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Keep all internal result pages out of the index and blocked from crawling. Otherwise the search URL becomes the injection point for the spam described elsewhere in this chapter.
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