 And thank you everyone for joining, good morning or early afternoon depending on where you are. As Mickey mentioned, I lead the data strategy practice here at Parsons TKO. And a big part of this is helping organizations leverage the data they have to do more with their audiences. And that's a big part of what we want to talk about today is the hidden value that we have in our data. In particular, search data. So we're going to talk about how to use your search data in particular with how to improve your communication strategy in mind. But the truth be told is the opportunities to use search data go beyond even just communications. And it really is an audience engagement resource, something that we can use for a lot of different purposes in an mission driven organization in particular. To give a little bit more context and to help you understand how we look at things like this, how we look at data and it's rolled potential for it to make changes in the way mission driven organizations work. I want to talk to you about engagement architecture. Engagement architecture is our company philosophy and methodology. And it helps us see an entire organization, an entire organization's ability to engage its audiences. So we look not just at the audiences, nor the technology, but we're looking at the people and the processes and how all of them work together to enable organizational strategy and audience engagement strategy. What types of experiences can we create for our audiences and how do those lead to engagement. And of course there's this thread line that goes through all of that of data. And that's what we're going to talk about today is how we can use that data and a particular search data to feed back into the way we create our experiences into the way we manage our people and the way we design our processes to improve the end user experience, the end audience experience. So this is the context and the way we're going to be thinking about data in this sort of holistic context. In that in mind, we're going to get pretty specific today about certain data resources tools, in particular ones that are going to be most broadly applicable to anyone, no matter which organization you're at. There's a decent chance that you have some subset of these types of data. First and foremost, we're going to be talking about Google itself and Google search data and how we can access that and how we can use that to learn about our audiences. And second up and really a close second is going to be your internal site search data. And it's often forgotten and I think a largely overshadowed by Google search itself, but it offers a separate distinct and in its own right very uniquely valuable resource in terms of learning about your audiences. We're going to have a little bit of an honorable mention of social media. It's not necessarily search data itself, but it can be very related. And I also want to talk very briefly about other types of interactions on your website, things that we might call quasi search. And those can come down to things like navigation behavior, the way people are moving around your site in itself is it's not using a search box, but it is a searching behavior. So this is a sort of a big picture. Let's take this as our agenda. We're going to talk through these different data resources very tactically about what they are where they are how you access them and things you might do with them. And then we can talk a bit more about how we might leverage this data, things that we might do with it. So as we go in. I know I mentioned on the first slide, you know, put your questions in Q&A. I'll be trying to keep half an eye on that as we go. And we'll get to a Q&A section but I'm also not against interrupting the flow so if something comes up, you know, don't be shy about about putting your questions in there. So as we dive into this topic of search data, I think it's sometimes helpful to anchor ourselves in the real world and really think about what search data represents. Imagine if you owned a storefront and people who come into the store occasionally will talk to you and ask you for the things that they're looking for. And if they come to you, you know, they might ask for toilet paper and then they might ask the next person might ask for milk, then another person might ask for toilet paper again, and then cheese, bread, caviar, avocado. If you were sitting there behind the desk, fielding these questions all day, you would start to respond to the things that people were asking to the things that people were saying to you, because these are people who are coming to you who are looking for something. And you're probably going to change the way your store is oriented so that you can start answering those questions passively, in part because you don't want to deal with the effort of answering it all the time. But really because it's just good business. It is good business to anticipate your audience's needs and really learn from your audiences as they express their needs and do our best to make sure that we're surfacing the right thing for them. So it goes in the real world, so it goes in the digital world. As we're managing digital content, the search data is an invaluable resource to help us understand who our audiences are and what they're looking for. And this is a common hesitation that people have when we start talking about search data in particular site searches. They say, what if my audience is too small? What if my search volume is too small? Why is it worth even considering it if I'm only getting a small amount of traffic from search? In general, when we look at websites, traffic from search usually falls in a range of 30 to 70%. It's very wide. It depends a lot on the type of organization you are, the type of brand footprint that you have. But that's still, I mean, it's a huge fraction of overall traffic. And you can learn from every one of those people who are coming in from Google search, there is data, there is a data trail from their behaviors. I think the next one, and this is a part of why it's so often forgotten is site search. We typically see in the range of one to 3% of traffic. Again, it depends on the type of organization you are, how your website is designed, how prominent site searches. Some organizations might be less than 1%. But still, let's just think about this in context. It's one to 3% of everyone who's coming to your website. And so, I mean, let's just take for example, you know, there's this illustration on the right. If you have a website of a million visitors over some time period. If you're only 30% search, that's still 300,000 people who you are getting data from. If your site search is only 1%, that's still 10,000 people who are expressly typing into their little box what they're looking for. So it may not sound like a lot of people, but compare that to traditional market research methods, things like focus groups, where you're lucky if you even get 100 people to chime in and answer their questions. And grant you that's a very different format. You know, you get more time with them, more opportunity to ask questions. But it's also so much more effort, so much more cost than just this passively collected data. And it's important to note that the people who are using search to find your stuff are very likely some of your most engaged and interested in motivated audience members. That's somewhat true for Google search. But it's especially true for site search. Somebody's going to be using your site search. They really want it. People don't use site searches very often. And so it's not usually a knee jerk reaction, people are more likely to go back to Google search than they are to use site search. So if they're taking the effort to find and use your site search probably means they really want it and they really want it from you. So this is an important audience to take into consideration no matter how small it may seem. You know, there's the saying, you know, from Willie Sutton, why do we rob banks because that's where the money is. Why do we study search because that's where our audiences are telling us what they want. And so that's why we're going to focus today on on search data. And in particular, we're going to talk through Google search console. We're going to talk about some I on search site on site search data and where that lives. And we'll talk a little bit about Google trends as well as a way to cross reference the things that you're learning about your site search. And as I mentioned earlier, there there are definitely honorable mentions other things that can help you understand what people are looking for sources of keyword data, your Twitter, and other social platform. And there's a lot of data that you can get from there. Add platforms give you another perspective on on search behavior, especially Google with Google AdWords. And there's lots of other places where you can get keyword data to cross reference and do deeper keyword analysis. So people who are emailing you, if you have a live chat feature on your website. I think about surveys, lots of places where you can get data like this, but the most common and the largest volume is going to come from these search sources. Right there, and let people process what we've said. You know, next we're going to go through some of these tools one by one, talk a little bit about them talk about the type of data that they have. And then after that we will get to some of the use cases. So as we go through this next section, please think about yourselves think about the work that you do. I think that people are seeing themselves in today's talk and really thinking about their own workflow, the decisions that you make decisions you make about content. And so please keep that all in mind and and please, you know, type into the chat as we go. See, we do have one question already about on site search tools and if there are plugins and tools to use, we can certainly talk a little bit about that. And let's get on that when we get to the site search section. So thank you, thank you very much. Before we get into site search, let's talk about Google search. Google search console is your portal. It is a big gift that we have from from Google in order to give us everything that we need to know about how people are finding our content. So Google search console helps you discover the frequently searched items that are foundational to your content. So it's going to surface for you what people are saying most often and I think when you look at that first page you're going to see a lot of stuff that's very familiar. You know it'll be obvious that that's what people are searching for. And what's I think especially important to note is that when you are looking at your queries on Google search console. There's there's the obvious stuff at the top, but if you keep clicking through the pages you're going to see the long tail. There are a lot of different variants of what people are putting in there. And the further you go the more interesting and arcane and obscure it is. And so one of the analysis things that you'll want to do is to really go deep, go deep and look for not just individual terms, but look for trends in the terms. And, and, and I think this is going to be. It can be a lot of work to do sort of in a data way if you're thinking about spreadsheets and analyses, but don't underestimate your brain's analytical capability. Even if you just scroll through all the content and just sort of look at it just glance at it row by row as you go. Your brain is going to start to identify trends you'll say oh hey there's one of our experts oh there's another expert. Oh wow I'm seeing a lot of expert names as we go here. And it starts to give you a sense of what are the types of things that people are thinking about when they find your content on Google. In addition to finding content there's also the people who are getting the opportunity to find your content, but aren't engaging with it for one reason or another. So don't just look at the impressions, but look at the clicks, and I think most importantly look at the click through rate. Look at the difference between when people search and whether they follow through on your content, because that's going to tell you a lot about, you know what people are noticing about your content and whether or not your content matches with with your expectations, or rather with their expectations. Having that click through rate information and if you look at the content that's ranking. If you look at the bounce rate and on site behaviors or those people. It'll you'll start to understand whether or not you're satisfying their needs. And if you're not then that's an assigned that maybe you want to change the way you talk about this content. Maybe there's something that they want to know about your area of expertise that you're not getting into enough detail on. So really starting to ask yourself questions about, you know, how you write about the things that people are searching for is going to change that on site experience. Give me just one second here to refresh my screen share. That should come back up again. So next up let's talk about onsite search. So onsite search is is different from Google search. I think that's the first thing that I really want to emphasize you cannot emphasize enough. The mindset of somebody using onsite search is different. So onsite search is usually work for somebody who knows what they want and they're looking for it and they want to get to it quickly in the world and and are getting to your site because you have it and and they're they've successfully made it to your content. On site searches in some ways the exact opposite. These are people who are already on your site, they already know that you have it, but they are not successfully finding it in traditional ways. So it's kind of being the marketing that you did to bring them there in the first place or your onsite navigation and calls to action, whatever happened organically to get them to your site, they haven't found what they want yet. So so it's kind of giving you the negative space over what your audience is looking for and what you need, whereas Google search was giving you the positive space and what people were looking for and successfully found. So please in mind, look at your site search data to understand the gaps in your content, your content strategy, and even your editorial strategy because again your site search system is going to represent and reflect the way your content is written the way it's organized. There are going to be some taxonomy choices in there there's going to be some keyword choices that you're making that may or may not be affecting people's success and finding your content. So looking at this again is going to give you insight that your editorial can use to prioritize topics for future content creation, or to edit content that exists to help it align. And then I think to the question that we got in chat before. This could also be really useful information for what kinds of tools you're using. There's lots and lots of search platforms out there. And, you know, we can certainly talk, you know afterwards an offline about specific tools, what tool you use is a little bit of function of what CMS you're using what tools are going to plug in well with that. So we can name drop a couple. I think you know Algolia search is one that I know we've often recommended to clients. But really it's going to be a function of what tool you're using, what type of search experience you're trying to create, you know, is it just the sort of quasi Google people are just going to put words in and magically the text has to appear, or is it the quasi navigational experience. Do you want to have the ability to have lots of filters and dropdowns. And some search engines will even allow you to sort of have tunable interests. You know, do I do I want something that is of a certain length, you know content length I'm looking for long documents versus short. So exactly what tools going to be right for you is going to be a function of what experience you're trying to create. Search data data will will really help you dig into that and especially as you look at the search terms, the things that people are looking for. They're telling you what they hope your website has and and how they will look for it. So I think looking at search site search data can be useful in helping you design your taxonomy. You know, are there are we describing our content in the right way. You know we call it reports, but everyone who uses site search is looking for issue breeds. In your audience's mind at least analogous terms. And so let's just align the way we talk about our content with the way our audiences describe our content. So next up is Google trends. I think and I hope that many of you are already familiar with this. So the way for us to cross reference the terms that we're seeing in our own search data or personal search data, our organization search data I should say, with global trends and how people are using language. So if you're seeing that people are looking for something in particular. And you can see how that data is trending, you can then put it into Google trend and see how it's trending universally so it is this something that trend that's unique to your organization, or is this part of a global trend. And then let's look at other global trends. Are there other things that we can use other phrases we can use that are even more common than the one that we are seeing success with. Could we amplify our success by writing a parallel trend. And so these are the types of things that we can explore. This is this is particularly useful for organizations that have mass market outreach. If you are publishing on a scale that is trying to catch the news cycle, then this is an invaluable resource. If you're doing something that's much more curated for very particular audiences subsets of experts. You'll find Google trends a little less relevant. But even still it can be helpful, even in an understanding word choice. There are different terms, more or less common in the sort of public zeitgeist, because even the people you're trying to influence, if it's a small unique set, then then we'll want to understand who they're trying to influence because some of the people you're trying to influence might have mass market, you know, aspirations on their own. So I think that's another thing to sort of be conscious of and another tool that's useful. I have. I see I'm seeing some questions come into the chat so I'm going to jump to that in just just a moment. I want to talk very briefly about Twitter monitoring. And this, you know, so it goes for Twitter so it goes for other platforms, Twitter is particularly valuable because it is a sort of big and open universe. And it's very easy to get access at Twitter data, whereas other social platforms are a little bit more locked down it's a little bit harder to do analysis on that data. But this is a great place again to cross reference what you're seeing in your own search data keywords that are trending keywords that you maybe haven't fully leveraged and haven't tapped into the audience that's interested in that. So I think for those terms on social media can then help you find new audiences or influencers who are using those terms. And those are people who you should be trying to engage, you might find new partnership opportunities there, maybe you find another organization that's closely aligned with yours. Regardless, this will help you find conversations you should be a part of when people are talking about these terms, is there something going on in the world that they've tapped into is our conference you didn't know about. And it's just a great place to build your awareness and understanding of how the public audience is thinking about the terms that you need to strengthen yourself on. And so here we've got a bunch of a bunch of terms and sorry, a bunch of tools and platforms that can be useful there. If you listed them all we would go on for many pages there are truly thousands of tools that can help you tap into this data. Again, it depends on exactly what you're trying to do. How much time you can put into it how much learning you want to do with a new tool. But these are some tools that can at least get you started. So, I want to talk about the best analysis tools, but let me just turn to some of these questions real quick. You know I think one question here which is very good. I'm surprised that you're seeing onsite search as a potential failure and navigation, rather than simply an alternative way to navigate for many. Do you find that most are browse focused rather than search focused. And is that changing over time. I think it's a great question. It certainly is an alternative. And it's, it's never anyone's preferred alternative so if you look at site usage data, you are going to find far more people are trying to browse your site. If you're just looking at raw clicks on that top banner or the hamburger icon, whatever you call it. That is that's the default, you know that's what people expect they expect that if I click or engage with this thing that's supposed to help me find what I want it will do so very quickly. And anyone who's ever tried to buy a software package and looked for the pricing link in the navigation and you it's never there. You know what I'm talking about right you know what you want I'm looking for it. Check the footer I'm looking all over and and in these situations when people start to get frustrated if you have a site search that's going to be the sort of pressure release valve. I don't expect that you know you site search shouldn't be a part of your plan site searches of fallback and unless unless your site search is so amazing and it gets right every time. And it's really cool maybe it auto completes maybe there's artificial intelligence. But then you could put it front and center, but otherwise, I wouldn't expect site search to be anyone's preference and preferred way of doing it. Again, people have to be very motivated to go into your site search. Another question that we got here with internal search. Is there any weight given to just lazy visitors with everyone googling questions is there some way to visitors to your site search that also. And and I easier to search than to actually take the time to read and navigate. I think again. That question feels more right for Google. I think people who are just lazy visitors are more likely to do that in Google. Check your brand traffic, which we'll talk about a little bit later. But when people search your brand and then what they're looking for. That's a lazy visitor. They navigate the site they just want to get a link straight to it. Internal site search again it's it's more of a, I'm here I don't want to leave. And there are a lot of other more natural ways of getting to content. And so, so I think let me just go up a couple tabs here. For the onsite search. I mean you're getting information from these people who there's lots of other real estate here. There are lots of other places they could have clicked. But instead they went to your site search and they typed it in in a way that's not universal right this is this everyone site search is fairly unique. It's usually in a different place. You know where it's always the same way you just open a new tab and it's right there in Chrome. So you're getting a lot of information, both about what they're looking for. And I think there's another, you know, important concept here which is the idea of search refinements. Sort of a unique phrase that you might not be familiar with, but it means people who searched didn't get what they wanted, and then searched again. So again, there's a level of effort that goes into site search. And you'll get to see people who are really trudging through your stuff. So that that's motivation that to me, almost always means motivation, rather than laziness. So I wanted to end this section on the best analysis tools, lots of data, lots of platforms, lots of places where this data can come from. What do we do with it, how do we use it. Again, don't underestimate your own brain, your own brain is a very powerful analytical tool. It is forget artificial intelligence it is the original intelligence. But, but I think, you know, sometimes you want to go beyond that. And if you do the best tools to start with, particularly for busy mission driven organizations is as the tools you already use. Like for sites for social media data, I mentioned some of those other platforms, if you already have them rate. If you have the time to invest in learning a new tool, there's lots of things out there. But don't underestimate the things that you already use if you know how to use it you will more likely succeed in using it. So much of your analysis on search data, especially sort of ad hoc exploratory, I just want to learn about this space analysis can be done with with really simple tools just go to these platforms Facebook, Twitter, search console, Google Analytics, and download your data into a spreadsheet and and play with the spreadsheet spreadsheets are great spreadsheets are cool. Everyone loves spreadsheets once they get used to them. Let this be your if you don't use spreadsheets on a daily basis let this be your reintroduction to them. Because it's there's a lot of really interesting stuff in there and just some of the simple formulas you can use in a spreadsheet to look for patterns look for how many of how many things like this are there. There's a lot of ways you can do that in a spreadsheet. If you know how to use and build dashboarding tools, then it's great that they're you know it's great to build reports in there. You can make self service tools that the rest of your team can use if you are a data expert on your team. You can make this data which is admittedly dense you can make it more accessible by building dashboards. But but really I, if you can, if you can get started using tools you already know, do that do that first. If you need to go beyond that, give us a call and we can we can talk through what more advanced analyses might look like. I want to talk a little bit about how to ask the best questions and a quick sort of a broader data strategy interlude. This is this advice is not specific to site search this is just sort of analytics advice in general, be kind to your analyst. There are difficult questions to answer some tips to help ask better and easier to answer questions are, you know, those what and why questions are very thought provoking their great at demonstrating strategic curiosity strategic vision, but they are very hard to answer, often ambiguous to answer questions clear yes or no questions are much easier, particularly if you don't have a dedicated analyst, if you're asking your social media person or your email person to jump into this search data and do something that's a little out of lane, giving clear yes no questions is going to be make it a lot easier for them to come back successful, or at least feeling successful be clear about the decision you're trying to make based on the answer to your question. I think that context of of how will we change course based on what we learn from this data is going to help people really gauge how confident they feel. You know they might be like oh yeah yeah this is totally cool. Oh, you're going to get rid of our CMS you're going to totally overhaul the platform. Well I'm not that sure. And so, so I think having that context is going to make a big difference in and how seriously you should take findings that you get from your data analysis. And then lastly trying to pose your questions in terms of the data your analyst has available. This takes a degree of self awareness about your organization's data strategy. What data do you have how how far can you go. How much can you apply data from one system to data you have in another system. But the more you can do this the more the more you can empathize with your analyst. The more difference it will make in terms of getting answers that you can trust answers that you can make decisions based on. So getting back to search a little bit how to ask the best questions of search data. Here's a couple examples. So things like where do real search patterns differ from our expectations. I think that we can update editorial guidelines. If you think you know what your audience is going to be searching for. Let's actually check, you know if you think more everyone's going to be searching for our brand, because we're so famous, and we're so important. Let's actually take a look and see. And, and, and if that's not the case, if it turns out that people are just looking for your issue and finding you. That might change the way you, you write your content. So really having those hypotheses that you can test you know is it yes or no. I think that's going to be valuable. Another example is what content serves more than just its intended audience. So we can think about cross marketing with it. And this is a very common Eureka when we're looking at our search data. We might have a report on a particular topic. And we think that everyone's searching for just that topic. But when we look at the search data, we're seeing that people are coming to it with phrases that were shocked that they found this content you know why did this rank. And it might be that you mentioned some other area of expertise in your report. And that's what helped it rank for that topic, even though the reports not totally about that it just a mere rep passing reference in the content. Some of these surprises happen, and it probably means that you have you have struck something that your, your audience is looking for, and there just isn't great content out there in the world. So look for those surprises where you have unexpected search terms showing up in the success of a piece of content. That's an opportunity to publish more on that content. It's an opportunity to elaborate in your report. Let's say more about this. Let's link to our other content. Maybe you want to put a little house ad in the middle of the report that says if you're interested in this go over there otherwise keep reading. There's lots of things you can do with those discoveries. What are people searching for that we don't have much content on so that we can create more like it. So going back to Google search console, and, and the things that we can see the things that we can learn about what people are looking for. If we're ranking we're getting traffic, but we're not getting clicks. It means our contents not totally aligned with those searches. So how can we publish more content to strengthen our authority in that area, maybe create something that more precisely catches their attention. You know it has the title and the little descriptor that really gives them their answer to those questions that were not really successfully serving right now. And then lastly, how many people search for something that we think is easy to find. So we might change navigation, a use case that we've talked about a bit already. But again, if people are searching for it, particularly if they're doing so an internal site search. It means that they weren't there already they were already on that page they wouldn't be searching for it. So how can we change the way we have our traffic flow through our content, be that navigation for onsite traffic flows, or, or our marketing. So have we been including the link to this particular piece or this thing that people are looking for often in our newsletter doesn't need a permanent home in our newsletter. What are the things that we want to do to make sure that people find what they're looking for. And this this data helps you answer the question of what they're looking for. So we'll pause there again, I think, I think I am caught up on chat so far. But I was going to transition now into some example analysis. So targets for search data. What are some of the things we might do, we just talked through a couple examples there. And those, you know, good questions that we might ask. But I want to go into a few other case studies and really think a bit more more in depth about those. And I do though, if there are any questions, please, please pop them in the chat, and I will try to jump on them. So the first one I want to talk through is evaluating the value of brand. I think this is a big one. And, and, you know, if you do what I said open up your search data and just scroll through it, particularly your Google search data. It's probably the first use case that'll come to mind because you are going to see your brand there will be there at the top, because people who search for only your brand, get to your site, and that's a big source of traffic. They don't type in your URL, they search Google for your brand. That's going to be a huge fraction of your your organic search traffic. So, so that's I think a valuable thing to do and it's a valuable it's an informative thing to sort of see how much of your traffic is actually brand driven. You know, I think, usually, for the most part, what people find when they do this is that they search for your brand, and that's, that's a good portion, and it's the top, you know, it's at the top of the list. When you scroll down you're going to see less and less of your brand, and you probably have a very long tail of all kinds of other terms that people are searching for, or they're just searching for that term without your brand. And that's, that's where the gold is the gold is understanding those people who didn't know that it was you who did it. They searched for it they could have clicked on anyone's website but they chose yours for some reason. Because the people who are searching for your brand, and then the term that they're looking for those those lazy searchers is I think one of the chats described to them. They, they already know you, they already know that they want you, they're coming to you anyway, that you're probably serving them well they thought of you well enough to put your name in the search. So, so you're doing a good job there, they're important people that support them, take them seriously, but they're unlike those other people who didn't know that it was you. Those people don't know you well enough, you don't already have their loyalty their affinity. And so that's a really important audience to understand, let's explore them, let's see why they don't know about this, can we figure out where they are, can we figure out what types of content they're looking at. There's, there's a lot to be to learn to be learned in there. I think the other thing that I want to encourage people to do when they do brand analysis of their data is recognize that your brand is not just your organization, your programs have brands, your products have brands. You know if you have an annual report, that's a brand in and of itself. If you have some gala or some conference that that is a organizational product, it has a brand in and of itself. And last but certainly not least your people have brands, particularly if you're any in any sort of thought leadership role. You've got, you know, you've got these people who had their whole careers and people will follow them around journalists will follow them around. So I think that is another set of brands it's really important to understand. So define those brand definitions, and then take those definitions into your search data to really understand how behavior changes around those. And, and how it relates to different content areas. So, so I think this is a really useful thing to do, particularly when you're trying to talk to leadership about the value of different, you know, sets of your brand. But then also the opportunity that you have to engage audiences that aren't yet familiar with your brand. There's a there's a big sort of open field opportunity, and the rest of these people who care about your issue, but don't necessarily know you yet. The next one I want to talk about is how well you serve your audiences needs. So evaluating what gets high engagement from organic search traffic, and then doubling down on the terms that drive those audiences. So I think this is, this is really useful when we are doing editorial strategy, when we're trying to decide how we want to talk about if we're sort of, you know, coming up with an issue space coming up with taxonomies you know sort of structurally, but even if we're trying to figure out our ideology, you know, well how do we want to think about how do we want to talk about our issue. We can see from different variants, you know terms that are similar here I call it term a term be maybe it's term a and term 8.2. Can we see changes in the way people are behaving with the content, are they scrolling deeper and they're spending more time on the site, or conversion rates different, depending on what terms they're using. And this can really help us figure out how we want to talk about this stuff. If we, you know, want to think about how we want to represent ourselves. There are brand implications for the types of terms that we use. Maybe you're using language that is antiquated in the eyes of some subset of your audience. And it can help us find those variants. What are the alternative terms maybe you don't even know what term a is in your only using term be looking at this data can help us think through what are what are the options, what are the alternatives. I think this is a really powerful one for us to put that qualitative layer on our data. You know, just looking at term a or term be by itself. It's not good or bad it's just going to be a volume. But when we look at the difference between the two and look at the difference in behaviors. That's when you start to see, not only is this more popular but it's also more engaging, or perhaps the opposite is. Getting a ton of traffic from one thing, because everyone searches for it, but it's actually not relevant to your work so those people are disappointed and frustrated when they get to your site. So maybe it's actually the small volume term, small volume term that is getting the most engagement. And so let's let's you know it's a niche audience but it's the right audience. So, so looking at these behavioral differences can really help you pin down exactly what you should be doing editorially. And then I spoke to this briefly when we are on the social media slide, but I think it is. It's worth drilling down into. Because this is this is probably one of those organizational disconnects, like there's editorial process somewhere in the middle. You've got your search data and it seems analytic see, and maybe it's useful for taxonomy but those are very internal very architectural things. And then all the way on the other side of your organization, you have your audience engagement, you have the high volume, high frequency, really intuition lead in a lot of cases, social media conversations. There's a big golf between those things your search data and your social media engagement. And what I challenge you to do is build a bridge between those two, and try to bring your search data to your social media engagement, not to define it, not to prescribe how it should be run, but as a as a reference guide, as a resource for people to just put in the back of their heads and use as they're making those quick split second decisions about whether and how to engage with the conversation online. You know, you know, once again, so search data tells you the language people are using to find your content. You can bet those people if they're engaging on social media they're using those same terms there. So looking at this language can help you find these conversations. Maybe you usually search based on your brand or some top line description of your issue area, but your search data may reveal other ways that people describe that. Maybe there are subsets, sub communities that have a more pejorative or more euphemistic term that they use for your area of expertise. Let's go figure those out. Let's go find them let's go engage with those audiences. And, and again I think if you bring that engagement layer from from your search data analysis, you can, you know, just as they were, you know, perhaps skeptical versus really happy or in the previous one, an average or really bored. If it comes to social media, you're going to see those same behaviors. People might not really be interested if you talk about it in one way, but if you're using another phrase, then they'll be very amused or engaged or they'll appreciate that you seem to be listening. And, and, and search data is one of the places where you can listen and bring those those experiences and expertise over to live conversations. So again, this is a sort of resource that you can develop with your search data, and bring to your communications team, bring to your social media team, bring to program staff if they're thinking about, you know how to write their content that might change the way they do change if they really understood how people are behaving how people are talking about the work. And it can even be useful externally for your communities. Yeah, we could come up with lots of scenarios there but, but it's very helpful and I think being able to tie it to social media that last sort of phrase on the right there. There's a lot of cool posts to engage with. This can help people be very tactical with the way they respond to social media, but it can also really illustrate sort of what differences differences and phrases mean emotionally. Your search data can seem very aesthetic. There's not a lot of emotion in there. When you find search terms, and you correlate those with social media conversations that can really help people understand, you know, the, when people use this term they're doing so tongue in cheek. Or when people use this term they are angry about it because they find it offensive. So correlating your search and your social data can put a lot more again a much more qualitative layer and a very, very easily relatable and understandable qualitative layer on your search data. And then last but certainly not least, I want to talk about VIPs. So, you know, we have a lot of people who use our, our websites, who engage with us long term, be they brand ambassadors or high net worth donors. These are people who we really want to make sure we understand and make sure we're supporting. So again, if your architecture is set up in the right way. This is an audience that you can learn more about and if they're using your site search that you have the opportunity to capture those interactions that's a part of their relationship with your website, their relationship with your organization. So how do we use that language to develop an understanding of who they are as people what they're interested in. It might change the way we engage with them. It might change what we put in our next appeal. It might change what we asked them to do as volunteers. You know it turns out hey this person's very interested in, you know, on the ground activity, even though they're an executive, and we want it to be hands off. No let's embrace them let's really pull them into the work, because they're showing interest. So, so it's another place where we can listen to and learn about our VIPs. And I think to sort of, you know, wrap a lot of this up, shifting to meet your audience. This, this is a little illustration sort of event diagram of what we're doing with all of these different types of search analyses. We are looking at the words you use and how they compare and contrast with the words your audiences use. And when you find the things where you align already and you're successful. That's great. That's evidence that you're doing things well. Everything that you see where you're not getting good traction, good engagement. It's an opportunity to move the way you interact and you engage with them, and you target them with your language. It really helps you move how do you move that green circle over, you know, further into the yellow circle and expand it into the yellow circle. How do we capture more of the interest that our audience is demonstrating with their keyword entries into search data. And, and vice versa, you know all the way over there on the right, you have this low traction language, you know you're talking about your stuff and people just don't seem to care overall. So it's an opportunity to stop using things that maybe are misaligned, you know they're, they're strictly academic terms. And, and that's not who your audiences, it's who you may be but it's not who your audiences. So that low traction language is the kind of thing that you should try to steer away from, unless you know if you want to keep using it do so intentionally. Because maybe, maybe you don't actually care what the, you know, the general public is saying and how they, how they talk about your issue. Maybe you just have those three policy analysts on the hill who you are trying to influence. So be very intentional, but be aware of what you're doing and be aware about how and whether your, your language might, might, might align with audience expectations. And the last thing I'll say is, sometimes you have culture change as your mission. And the fact that nobody uses that low traction language is the problem. You know, this is great way to validate it. Hey, see, we're, you know, nobody's talking about this issue the right way, but recognize that you have your work cut out for you. People are not going to passively do that. So again, it should change the way you talk about that language. If you want to correct people, you know, explain why they should adopt your low traction language. So some wrapping up thoughts here for things I want to encourage you to do today. Go open up your Google Analytics and go look at your site search report, which should be under behavior. I know this actually goes back to one of the questions earlier in chat that I didn't answer, which is where is this data. Your Google Analytics can and should be configured to capture this if you have site search. And if it isn't, then that's a relatively straightforward configuration that needs to be done. So go take a look. I will emphasize this first bullet has changed since the first time I gave this this talk, because your Google Analytics as it exists today has a time limit on it. It will only be there for the next year, Google Analytics as we all know it is getting retired. And so so this is going to change and in the future there's going to be a whole new architecture a whole new approach to getting at and studying your site search data. So that's a totally different topic we've got a webinar coming up at the end of the month, where we're going to talk about that Google Analytics issue but but while it's there, go get it because there's a lot of insights for you to to get at before the data disappears. So go to Google site, Google search console. That is the platform that Google generously provides to all of us to help us understand how our audiences are finding us. So it's free, and it gives you tons and tons of data. Make sure you have access to it might need to talk to your it team, whoever your site owner is. And just spend five minutes at least exploring each. Go through as I said scroll through that your brain do the heavy lifting of parsing what it sees and see if you can notice some of those trends. See if you could think through your work and how you might change your work based on what you're seeing. Think about the other people in your organization who else might benefit from this data. Lastly, I encourage you to schedule a meeting with someone, anyone on your team, and just sit down with them. Look at it together. Talk about it. I think just that habit that exercise of speaking aloud about this data, sort of seeing the data through someone else's eyes can change our relationship with the data and really start to help us understand how it can be used. So the way forward. If you're going to screenshot one thing screenshot this print it out put it on your desk. Make sure that you claim your data. It's out there it's getting collected. And if it's not it's sort of flitting through into the wilderness and that's a real tragedy because it's very valuable data. Really sit down with it come up with three hypotheses about what you think your audience was searching for, and go see if you can prove or disprove your hypothesis. Yes, no questions. They are, you know, our brand is or is not more important than the brands of our experts. You know, there's there's a hypothesis. Go see if you can validate that. Go see, you know, go see where the truth lies and see if this changes the way you think about your organization, the way you think about your work. Socialize your data. This is so important. And we've got another talk we can give you on data strategy overall. But the most important thing you can do with your data is to adopt it actually start using it integrate it with your workflows. Nothing works better to put data to work then talking to your colleagues about it. So I think that's really valuable. And then last but certainly not least plan with your data find ways to incorporate this into your editorial and publishing process. There are ways to create resources out of this data that, you know, reference guides that people can use when they're doing day to day work. Figure out if you can integrate it with your audience engagement, you know, team whatever that looks like, whether it's your volunteers whether it's constituents, whether it's donors. See if you can create tools to be used internally to change the way your teams work. That's the big picture there. That's my motivating raw raw quick call to action. If it isn't apparent we have done this before we work on this. We have projects designed to help people take ownership of their search data. And in the context of broader audience acquisition strategies, again thinking holistically as we do. So if you are interested in getting support with this please don't hesitate to reach out. At least we do things like this a lot. We've got articles on this we've got some materials that we can send after this webinar. If you want to learn a little bit more about how to get audience insights from your data. And we've got lots of other formats lots of other content, got a great podcast from our CEO. We've got a library of videos on all kinds of topics related to engagement architecture. And we run events like this more often than I can explain. We enjoy providing content like this to our community. So please keep in touch. And thank you. Thank you all very much. Got a few minutes left if anyone has any questions. I appreciate all of your time and attention.