You can learn a lot from listening to the users of your products and services. And while there are many touch points that we could discuss, there is one unsung hero that is still being underutilized: your site search engine. If you have a search engine, your customers are continually dialoguing with you. Search provides an ideal, single source for your business to listen to individual customers and to your brand community.

Search queries are a key indicator of buzz, purchase intent, brand efficiencies and deficiencies and will teach you more about your users than almost any other tool. Your community votes on what’s most useful by their search phrases and resultant clicks (or lack of).

Here are a few key things you should be looking for in your search engine logs. Study them to define exactly:

what verbiage site visitors use to find your products
how many times they search for something before clicking
what percentage of searches produce a purchase
what pages see the most search activity (i.e. home page, products pages)
what queries produce no results
common misspellings and misnomers
what verbiage consumers might be using in response to seeing one of your advertisements
what information is missing from your site or is really difficult to find (common ones are product pricing, return policy, guarantees, privacy policy)
which results receive the most clicks and why - do they have more descriptions, a picture, better titles, or do they just enjoy top ranking?

Digging into what your customers really want as expressed through search and clicks is one of the most essential methods to improve communication.

Take the opportunity to listen. Then, make a plan for giving your customers more of what they want and less of what they don’t. They’ll spread the word about the timely answers they receive from you and will begin to spread the word, building your brand, building your community.

Like the benefits good communication offers? Find out a few more ways to open up an ongoing dialogue with customers.

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