What Are Your Customers Searching For?
What are your agency’s website visitors looking for? Can they find it easily? How do you know?
Search analytics provide valuable data that can positively affect an agency’s Web strategy. This topic was the focus of a recent webinar, Show Me the Data: Leveraging Analytics in DigitalGov Search.
Dawn Pointer McCleskey, acting program manager for DigitalGov Search, discussed how agencies can leverage their search to improve the quality of their agency’s website. She also demoed new analytics tools available to agencies that use DigitalGov Search.
Data itself isn’t enough: once you have the information, it’s time for action. During the webinar, Michelle Chronister, user experience team lead for USAGov, showed how her team uses search data to plan out content and measure success.
Chronister shared an Excel spreadsheet (Excel spreadsheet, 513 KB, 14 tabs) that she uses for analysis and that can be modified for other agencies. Her slide deck (PowerPoint presentation, 651 KB, 30 slides) is also available.
By the Numbers: A Look at What People are Searching for on USA.gov
Chronister and her teammates recently published a blog post and infographic summarizing what people searched for on USA.gov in 2015.
Visitors to USA.gov searched for over 10,000 different words or phrases in 2015. Many of these terms are different, but have similar meanings—like jobs and careers. The USA.gov team grouped these terms into categories and sub-categories in order to get a larger view of what people want from the government. The most popular search topics this year were related to:
- Money and Shopping
- Agencies and Elected Officials
- Travel and Immigration
- Jobs and Unemployment
- Health
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