Short answer: Trust us, you don’t.

Long answer: Granted, any response prefaced by the words “trust us” is suspect. But if you’re asking this particular question—or struggling to answer it for someone else—then you need to take a crash course on something much broader than (and inclusive of) SSA: user-centered design. UCD is based on the assumption that no amount of experience, intuition, or expertise regarding users’ needs is a sufficient substitute for finding out directly from users what they need. There are simply too many unknowns and too many surprises for designers to safely assume that “they know what’s right”.

UCD practitioners rely upon a host of methods to learn about users’ needs: some are qualitative (such as field studies), some are quantitative (such as all forms of analytics, including SSA) and some have aspects of both (such as task analyses, card sorting, and surveys). SSA is simply one more tool in the toolkit, though it’s still relatively unknown and under-utilized.

So, if you’re already on board with UCD, look to SSA to provide yet another perspective on users’ collective behavior—in this case, one that’s based on loads of real data that you already own. If not, we suggest buying a crateful of Steve Krug’s mirthful masterpiece, Don’t Make Me Think!. Read one and hand the rest out to every important person in your organization.

Short answer: With minimal investment, SSA will save you time and money, help provide a better user experience for your customers, and make you a happier person.

Long answer: If you're already busy, then you should get down on your knees and kiss the ring of anyone who offers you an easier way to prioritize your work. SSA, as you'll see, is all about helping busy people prioritize their problems: What content should we create? How can we improve our tagging? Can we avoid running focus groups to determine what’s wrong with our search system? And so on, and so on.… By extension, using SSA will give you a better sense of the problems that don’t merit your attention. In effect, a minimal investment in SSA might make you a less busy person.

For example, you might be the primary author of your site’s content, creating prose at the behest of product managers, marketing staff, and other pests. The list of documents that require your attention is longer than you'll get to in any reasonable amount of time. Rather than pulling an all-nighter, you can use SSA to determine which of those documents is going to plug the exposed content gap by examining which frequent searches retrieved zero results. Now you can prioritize your to-do list knowing that you'll be working first on the documents that users’ need—not the stuff that’s on your list because a senior vice president wants it on the site.

Or perhaps you're responsible for your site's search system. Users have been complaining that search is failing them, so you're being pressed to replace the search engine application. That would be a difficult, time-consuming, and expensive undertaking. But your search analysis indicates that a few minor tweaks to the search interface and the implementation of a spell-checker would dramatically reduce the difficulties of searching—and, at one-tenth the cost of a new search engine. Now you’ve saved both time and money!

Short answer: No, not really. Well, sort of. There’s a difference between how users search the web to find your site (typically called Search Engine Optimization), and how they search within your site. This book focuses on the latter variety of search analytics. And for lack of a better, snappier term, we call this variety “site search analytics.”

Long answer: Knowing what keywords users enter to search in Google, Yahoo! or other web-wide search engines to reach your site is incredibly valuable. It also enables you to fine-tune a keyword ad campaign; perhaps, a campaign that could be designed specifically to draw visitors to your site accordingly. Once users reach your site, however, their needs often change. For many who search the web, the process unfolds in two stages: First, they figure out which site might have the answer to their query. Second, they search within that site for the answer. Because users’ information needs have changed, the data from these two stages of search will necessarily vary. SSA will help you do a better job with that second stage.

Many would argue that local search is no longer important: Users increasingly search Google to get them deep into a, thereby bypassing both the local site’s navigation and search system. Or, they use a combination of RSS feeds and aggregators to get the content they need without ever visiting that content’s home site, much less using its search system. There is some truth to these points, but local search isn’t going away any time soon for these reasons:

• Web-wide search tools like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN may not be optimized for local site searches, where criteria other than link popularity may be more important in determining how to rank search results.
• Sites with captive or loyal users, such as Amazon.com, can get away with local search that doesn’t match web-wide searching conventions.
• Sites with highly structured content, such as ESPN.com, often require a customized search system to allow searching specialized fields.
• Accessing a site’s deep content via syndication, however useful, supports a very different user scenario than searching. The former is an example of monitoring, while the latter fills a specific ad hoc need.
• Sites with “deep” content, not to mention Intranets and other secure systems, can’t be indexed or searched by web-wide search tools.

Short answer: For a variety of reasons, the people responsible for most websites remain ignorant of SSA’s existence and its benefits.

Long answer: It is strange that SSA isn’t more commonplace, especially when you consider how useful and relatively inexpensive it is. It’s even more surprising given the recent trend toward user-centered design. Three reasons seem most likely:

• Most people assume that anything that mentions “search” means search engines. Because search engines are a technology, they are typically the sole property of IT departments. So designers—the people most commonly responsible for user experience—don’t think to take on search experience, or aren’t allowed to by IT, who often have other things on their minds besides user experience.
• The people who should be responsible for the user’s search experience tend to work on challenges (such as improved navigation) are more within their comfort zone and are easier to fix.
• There is precious little guidance or reporting tools out there to help people perform SSA. Just reams of data, which can be difficult to pry from the IT folks, who have other things to worry about.

We hope this book helps break down these barriers by making a case for the value of SSA, and showing you how easy it is to do.

Short answer: Nothing is perfect, especially search. SSA is the best diagnostic tool to help you determine what to fix and how to fix it.

Long answer: Search is a very complex mix of users, behaviors, interfaces, applications, content, and context. There are many possible failure points—and room for improvements—along the way. With so much complexity and so many challenges, you could apply just about any user-centered design method, like task analysis or field studies, to analyze a search system. We’ll bet dollars to donuts that you’ll uncover plenty of dissatisfaction among searchers and many areas that beg for improvement. Anyone involved with designing and maintaining your site and its content will realize this. SSA just happens to be one of the least expensive, and perhaps most powerful, ways of analyzing your site’s performance.. And it’s the method most focused on the search experience.