I touched upon site search quite a while back in a previous post of mine titled How to Read Your Visitors Minds with 100% Accuracy. In that post I went into detail on how you can use site search to understand what your customers want.

I found this video from the folks over at Google and think it’s a nice extension to that post. The video takes the concept I presented earlier a step further and applies that to improving your pay per click advertising conversion.

Now, I’m not saying that this method is the best way to go to improve your ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend). It’s a nice way of researching and gathering more information about what keywords you might want to consider (or combinations thereof) but don’t use it as the end all be all.

For example, in the video we see that one of the top search queries recorded was “shirt”. I would never buy a word like this alone as it is too broad—even if you do sell shirts. I would consider (if you are not already doing it) however, bidding on something like “blue short sleeved oxford shirt” (as an example).

I believe that using site search as a research tool for your business is extremely smart. It opens the doors to your customers mindset. I saying this, I also think it can come in handy for determining how you might want to consider expanding your current paid search campaigns. Just be careful you do your homework after you gather the data to ensure the words you choose provide the best opportunity at achieving a positive ROI.