I recently had a discussion with an executive at a large, natural resource provider in the California Central Valley.  Customers had started complaining that the information they needed wasn’t available on their website.  I asked if they had been paying attention to what users where searching for with the site’s internal search feature.  Unfortunately, they hadn’t and they probably had pie in their face unnecessarily.

Setting up and automating a failed search terms report is quite easy in most popular web analytics tools.  Doing the analysis amounts to looking through the top portion of this report monthly and ensuring that you have content focused on what was searched for and not found.  Your editors will welcome the new work and more importantly, your customers will be amazed at how you seem to read their minds.