The keyphrases visitors use when they search your site are gold.

They:
• let you know what visitors are looking for
• indicate what visitors may be looking for and cannot find easily
• identify possible problems with navigation labeling or content

Knowing what visitors are looking for can also give you ideas for SEO optimised content, if you have a lot of searches for a keyphrase then this is obviously something your visitors are interested in. If this content already exists on your site a high search volume could indicate that people cannot find it and that you need to raise its profile on the site.

Ok, some of you may have access to search reporting depending on the search engine you use on you site but I long ago forgot how to access these and anyway I wanted to view them in my Google Analytics (GA) account because, I want all my web stats intelligence in the one place – it’s just easier, isn’t it?

So…this is how you link your web search to your GA account:
1. Login into your account and click ‘edit’
2. You should now be in your ‘profile settings’, click on ‘edit’ in the top right-hand corner
3. Scroll down to ‘Site Search’
4. Make sure ‘Do Track Site Search’ is selected
5. Open up your website, enter any search term in the search box and press return
6. Enter your ‘Query Parameter’ in the field provided. Please enter only the word or words that designate an internal query parameter such as “term,search,query”. Sometimes the word is just a letter, such as “s” or “q”. You may provide up to five parameters, separated by a comma
7. Select whether or not you want Google Analytics to strip out the query parameter from your URL. Please note that this will only strip out the parameters you provided, and not any other parameters in the same URL.