I now have approx 5,000 search terms to analyze rather than what I thought was a previous maximum of 500.

Note, that you may need to play around with this, trying different export formats and values within the query string and the number rows won’t show with the analytics dashboard (they’ll only show when you open the exported file).

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This is a web project doing things differently in Government, although on the project’s own blog they say they “… are not the first to tread this path” [in Government], they’re certainly one of the most high profile.

Aside from the agile approach, which has often been suggested as poorly suited to Government, what I love about this project is the openness. The frequent tweeting, ‘huddle-ing’ and sharing of details about the project, even before the site went live. It is a project not shrouded in mystery that seems not to be scared to take criticism and comment. They have fully adopted the concept of ‘open’ not just through using open source technology but also through their open engagement and collaboration with the public.

I love the ongoing conversations taking place on the project’s Get Satisfaction community, not only are the project team responding to comments and problems but the users themselves are finding solutions through dialog with each other.

Obviously, this approach makes logical sense, it is the public whom this website is supposed to serve, this is the ultimate model of a user-centered approach.

There is no doubt a long way to go with the project, but the initial stages have been very positive.

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Approx 15% of visits to our intranet involve search, with 10,000+ searches run on average a month. It is therefore important that the search results are working for users.

I carry out a monthly exercise to identify searches which aren’t performing as well as expected. By improving the keywords, structure, titling and language of any relevant content I try to improve the search results. A month later I come back to see if the changes have had the desired impact and to repeat the exercise.

Using the search terms tab within the site search section of the content report within Google analytics I identify the search terms with a high results pageviews per search (see the circled column within the image below). My thinking is that it is bad for a user to have to click to more than one results page for a search (I have always been taught that the majority of users won’t even look beyond the first results page).

Using the results pageviews/search column (circled) can assist in identifying terms which users are having trouble searching for

I tend to look for search terms with a value above 1.55 (the site average), giving greatest attention to the terms with the highest values (I have seen terms with values as high as 4.00). Alarms bells should ring if your site average is around the 2.00 mark. Terms with high values in comparison to those search terms with a similar frequency catch my attention more than infrequently used terms with a high value.

The impact of any changes take time to have a visible impact and our intranet searches seem fairly fluid, 50-60% of the top 10 terms used change monthly, meaning this is a valuable exercise to revisit monthly.

I also restrict the number of modifications to 10-15 terms each month, we have 6,000+ unique terms used each mothh, if I can get the most common used terms performing well the less common (but similar) terms should hopefully improve similarly.

There is a caveat to this work, you are working with one main assumption: that you know what content users are looking for when they search using a particular term. Revisiting the changes you have made after a month is important to ensure that the changes you have made have had the desired impact, suggesting your assumptions about the content being looked for were correct.

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Is it me or has the quality of Google’s search results dropped off recently? It seems many of the results making the top rankings of the SERP are dominated by link-building ‘fake’ sites.

It doesn’t have anything to do with trying to encourage users to click on the paid-for ad links I suppose?

Come on Google, sort-out your algoritham to pick up and promote the natural links a bit more, thereby encouraging the (few badly behaved) SEOs to act a bit more responsibly, in-turn ridding the web of some of the horrible content that is out there.

Your famous for your good search results, we wouldn’t want people to search somewhere else now would we?

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The back button is the web users fail-safe, it’s something they can draw comfort from when they’re lost in the depths of a website. I’ve observed many a test where users click the back button five times instead of clicking the ‘home’ link once to return to a site’s front page. They understand and trust completely where the back button is going to take them, or so they think.

Thankfully the practice of deliberately preventing a user from leaving your website by the blocking back button has all but ceased, however with the increase use of AJAX and flash it seems there is more and more opportunity to break the back button ‘accidentally’.

I recently contributed to a discussion on the UX-Exchange about relying on browser for navigation and judging by some of the responses, even the experts are not in total agreement.  The question seems born out of the fact that technology breaks the back button, therefore should we create an alternative within a page.

When navigating a site the user is on a journey, they’re creating a mental path of where they have been, the back button allows them to traverse this mental path and start again if they took a wrong turn. Each turn on this journey is a click of the mouse, be that following a hyper link to another page or clicking a link to refresh a list of search results.

Until user behavior changes and the back button is no longer the third most used feature (behind hyper links and in-page buttons) we should do all we can to avoid breaking the back button, irrespective of the technology we’re using.

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