Chapter 2
How to Use Search Data to Improve Your Business and Product Strategy
Searchers aren’t an isolated demographic from the rest of your target audience. Searchers are your target audience. And they’re telling you exactly what will compel them to buy your products, engage with your company, and become your strongest advocates.
The largest source of this information is through the major search engines, particularly Google. Millions of people search using these search engines every day, and in aggregate, what they search for and how those searches change over time provides incredibly useful insight into their needs.
Just as valuable as the words they type are the ways they behave. Search engines know exactly what people click on after they enter a query. They know what content searchers viewed then quickly returned to the search results to look for a better answer. They can follow the entire search session to better understand intent: What did the searcher type next? What result did the searcher click on that ended the search?1
Research companies like Enquiro Research (now part of Mediative) augment this understanding of searcher intent with data about what searchers see as they scan the search results and what they focus on, as well as what they skip. And research into how the brain processes information as we search helps complete the picture of what searchers are really after.
Marrying how we search (behavior) with why we search (intent) and what we search for (query volume) ...
