Keyword Targeting – Tracking Visitor Searches

I recently ran into an impressive WordPress plugin, Search Meter. What it does is track the searches which your visitors do in the search form of your WordPress blog/site, it then reports to you; the most recent searches, the most popular searches and the most popular searches which returned no results. Here is a screenshot –

The most useful part of the plugin is the unsuccessful searches summary – put simply, these keywords are what your visitors want to read but you are not providing, so this could be a great source of inspiration for post topics. Additionally, if somebody is searching for a keyword in your search form there is probably many more people searching for it in the search engines, so creating a page targeting this keyword will likely bring search engine traffic assuming there’s not too much competition.

This plugin is just for WordPress but you could easily code this into your custom developed website with basic to intermediate PHP and MySQL knowledge, I have explained how to code search tracking in another post – Have you SEOed your search feature?. This method is a great way to find keywords which you really should be targeting but aren’t, I hope you can utilize it well.