Does your site have a search engine? If so, you're sitting on an often under-utilized pot of gold: search query data that describes what your customers really want from your site—in their own words. Site search analytics helps you understand and benefit from that data, enabling you to better diagnose and solve a multitude of user experience problems. The result: better content, better navigation, better search, better interface design, and a better user experience.
In this day-long workshop, Lou Rosenfeld—co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and the forthcoming Search Analytics for your Site: Conversations with your customers—will combine lecture, discussion, and extensive hands-on exercises to cover the basics of site search analytics. And he'll show you how spending even an hour a week analyzing your search queries can help tune and improve your site and expose new opportunities for improving your business strategy.
You'll learn to:
- Understand search logs and relevant analytics reports
- Ask the right questions of your query data
- Identify where your site's search and navigation are failing, and learn how to fix them
- Tune your content to your audience's needs and plug your site's content gaps
- Enhance your site's navigation through improved metadata
- Design better interfaces for entering queries and for presenting search results
- Improve your search engine's configuration
- Reinvigorate your user experience methodology by incorporating a method that's truly quantitative, and which helps improve your qualitative methods
For a fuller description of what we'll cover, review the workshop outline or view the full presentation (via SlideShare).
We won't cover:
- The technical aspects of analytics tools (such as how to install one on your server)
- Search engine optimization; that's about helping people find their way to your site, while site search analytics is about helping them find information within your site
If you're attending the Washington, DC workshop, add one more day to your trip and take Steve Krug's web usability workshop; you can register for both sessions at a substantial discount.
- Web designers and user experience designers (information architects, interaction designers, usability specialists, content authors) will learn to use data to diagnose, prioritize, and address problems with their sites—and to integrate a data-driven user research tool into their broader design methodologies
- Web analytics professionals will benefit from applying search analytics to improve performance in areas aside from traditional transaction conversion
- Managers will be able to use real behavioral data to better understand their customers' needs—and may unearth new opportunities to enhance their organizations' business strategies
"...your workshop helped us use our search engine as a better resource. Before we were looking at our monthly logs and saying things like 'isn't that interesting.' Today, we are adding some custom results for specific searches, and we are thinking about changing the layout of our results page to improve our sites usability."
—Greg George, Information Architect, Georgia State University
"I had some understanding of reviewing top searches before this seminar but it brought to light many other areas I had not yet thought of. With the information from the workshop I have been able to take this to the next step in our agency."
—Stephanie Edwards, Web Production Manager, U.S. Customs and Border Protection
"Your workshop helped me to implement site search analytics, and gave valuable advice on which questions to ask."
—Tilman Becker, Manager Online Communications, LSG Sky Chefs
"The workshop helped me greatly by raising my awareness of the practice and the value of measuring what your visitors are looking for."
—Brent Hardinge, Web Designer
Lou Rosenfeld is an information architecture consultant and founder of Rosenfeld Media, a publisher of short, practical user experience books. He has helped numerous Fortune 500s and other large, messy, political enterprises make their information easier to find. Lou is co-author of the best-selling Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O'Reilly & Associates; 3rd edition, 2006) regarded as the bible of information architecture, and is co-authoring, with Marko Hurst, the forthcoming Search Analytics: Conversations with your customers. He is co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute and UXnet, the User Experience Network. More about Lou.
