Search bars are becoming increasingly popular on websites. By adding a search bar to your website, a visitor can search the content of your website for a certain search term. This allows the visitor to find what they are looking for even faster and find additional relevant links. Search bars are especially interesting for very large websites and webshops!
Some time ago we wrote an article about the importance of a search engine on your e-commerce website. And we gave a list of search engines that are definitely worth trying.
Search engines make it very easy for your visitors. But did you know you can benefit from this as well? With one simple free plugin, you can see what your visitors are looking for and use these search analytics to your benefit.
WP Search Insights
With WP Search Insights you get insight into the search behavior of your visitors! It is actually a kind of search analytics, with which you can discover which keywords your visitors are using.
The WP Search Insights plugin is very convenient to set up and use. The biggest advantage is that you can find all information directly on your website! So you don’t have to navigate to another document or website!
Would you like to have it as a CSV file? Then just export it!
The plugin records all searches made on your website. Besides that you can also see where people are searching! Gather an overview of the most popular searches and get an overview of the searches with or without results.
WP Search Insight is also very privacy friendly. It does not store any personal information of the visitor!
WP Search Insights : how to use
WP Search Insight installs just like any other plugin! Then the plugin voluntarily gives you a tour. This tour will immediately show you all the important elements!
First, WP Search Insights adds an extra box to your WordPress website dashboard. This displays the top 5 search terms. But it additionally lists the top 5 search terms that don’t deliver results to visitors! From here, you can immediately navigate to WP Search Insights.
If you prefer to navigate to WP Search Insights yourself, you can find the plugin under ‘Tools’. Here you go directly to General where you can view different search elements. But you can also sort it per period.
But first, let’s start with the settings. Here you will obviously need to set some elements correctly, as some important items are off by default anyway.
You can choose to exclude Admin searches. These queries will not be shown. Quite handy!
You can also determine how many characters a search must have to be registered. And you can make it work perfectly with Ajax search forms.
We tested the search engine with the WordPress standard search engine and the JetEngine search function. So the plugin also works for alternative search engines!
But besides that, there is a very nice feature, which can be quite handy for some organizations. You can decide not to register certain keywords! So you can set up filters!
And finally, on the settings page, you can also delete your data and export it (on a specific period). Keep in mind that deleting data is irreversible! You can also indicate that the database must be removed by default when you remove the plugin.
Under “general” you will find all the nice data! So under all searches, you will see the search terms, the results, when and from (which page). You can also search there!
The results show how many search results there have been for the search term. You can view the search results by clicking on the search term! You can also use ‘from’ to see on which page the visitor searched.
Under ‘Most popular search terms’ you can also see which search terms are most popular and when the last search was made!
Under results you can see how many search terms produced results and how many search terms did not produce any results.
The plugin is not yet translated to all languages! But Dutch is already completely translated. Curious about which translations are still pending? You can follow the translations here!
WP Search Insight Pro
Currently, the full WP Search Insight plugin is free! They did announce that they are currently working on their first Add-on, being an integration with Akismet. To make spam searches work even better. After all, the current version only has basic spam protection.
But whether the Spam Add-on will be premium or free is still unknown. They also put their future plans on the table. Like an Add-on for WooCommerce, Analytics data and so much more!
WP Search Insights as a replacement for Google Analytics?
However, WP Search Insights is not a replacement for other analytics tools like Google Analytics. The plugin only shows you the results for search functions. So it only looks at what is happening on the site regarding search.
So the plugin won’t give you answers about organic traffic, what page people land on, where people are coming from and so much more.
Conclusion
In short, WP Search Insights is an excellent plugin for anyone who is curious about the search behavior of their users. The plugin effectively provides relevant data based on which you can start optimizing your website.
For example, you can write a new page or blog based on search results without any results. So you can start improving your website by applying this.
The free plugin offers everything you need! And the plugin does not store any personal data!
We are already curious about the Add-ons!
