Do you want to capture the search queries that visitors search for on your WordPress blog or website? Here’s a free plugin to help you do just that.
Full Video Transcript
Hey y’all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton and you have found a YouTube channel that loves WordPress. And every Wednesday I’m creating a video just like this to help you improve your WordPress website. So, be sure to click subscribe.
And, of course, I have to give a shout out to Pressable who allows this channel to happen every single month by sponsoring us. You guys, if you need help with your WordPress website, you need support, you need great hosting, be sure to check them out and tell them I sent you. They’re an awesome team. They’ve got awards for their awesome support.
Alright, so you’re here to find a search solution on your website. Something that can capture the search queries when a visitor comes to your website and does a quick search. How do you keep track of that? It’s really intelligent that you want to keep track of that, right?
So, let’s say for instance, I come here to search the library of videos and I’m looking for SEO and I click SEO and I go in here and, great, there’s a bunch of resources. So, that’s awesome. So, I could have tracked that click, or that search rather, by Google analytics. So, let me know how many times this page was viewed, right?
But, what if they’re doing a search for content that I don’t have? Which is just as important if not even more important. So, what if they’re doing a search for tacos or something really random like that and this type of page comes up? But we want to be writing to people interested in tacos or whatever it might be, right? We want to figure out, what are they searching for once they land on our website? What are they searching for internally?
So, I used this over on AskKori.com as well. I’ve got it here on the tutorials landing page, where you can come here and do a search. I’ve even got it up here in the top, where you can come here and do a search. I want to start capturing what people are asking for and trying to find on my website.
So, here’s a solution for you y’all. Are you ready? I found it and it’s in the budget of free. We love that. This is a plugin called Search Meter. I’m gonna show you how to install it, super easy setup. And I’m gonna show you what the back end looks like because for the budget of free, this things robust. It’s really exciting. As of today, of course, so in the future if you’re looking at this video and watching it please be sure that it’s up to date, that it’s going to be good for your specific WordPress version and we’ll get to that right now. So, you’re gonna go look for Search Meter.
Let’s go into your dashboard and we’re gonna go to plugins and we’re gonna say add new. And we’re gonna come over here to the little search area and we’re just gonna do ‘Search Meter’, right? And we should find it right here, this is it. Look at this, 30,000 active installs as of today. I mean, that’s huge, that’s a great following already using this, proving that it’s a great plugin. Great reviews and I’ll be adding mine here in a minute, too. You’re gonna click ‘Install Now’ and ‘Activate’.
If you haven’t already, you should have done a backup on your website, right? You always wanna be sure that it’s best practices to have a backup running on your WordPress website. I’ll put more information about that in the description box below. Just click ‘Show More’ and it’ll show you kinda how to do that if you haven’t already set that up.
Alright y’all, so, it’s activated, that’s it. It’s there, it’s in our space now. So, where it lives is inside of settings and Search Meter. So, you wanna go here first and kinda setup perimeters around it, because it’s asking you, do you wanna show statistics to different users or administrators inside of your website. So, I’m gonna say, only show admins the search results. And there’s all sorts of other things that you can say here as well. “Hide the “do you find this plugin useful?” section” You know, whatever you want to kind of walk through these individual settings and click ‘Save Changes’.
So, now, it’s active, ready to go. It’s gonna start gathering content. So, I’ve got this search bar here up at the top, right? You click on my little search icon and let’s do a search for … I’m gonna click refresh though for a second, just be certain that it catches up, that I have that plugin there. I’m gonna do a search for, let’s do SEO, what we just did. I’ll do a search and now we’ve got all of these projects pulling up, all these blog articles pulling up, all this content and classes that I have.
And we’re gonna come back into the dashboard, watch this, this is the cool part. And you get to see where they keep the library of queries. You now have an area over here under dashboard that says Search Meter, you open that up and here it is, you can see I’ve already been doing some testing.
So, the term SEO has been searched twice. It resulted in 68 different results on my website being presented to that person searching. And then there’s another one. Here’s Google, that I did a search for earlier, just testing. I did a search for WordPress Wednesday, there ya go. And you’ve got 173 results, obviously, that’s the name of my show, so.
But what’s cool is, this is gonna give you a running search from yesterday and today, seven days out, 30 days out, so you can start to see all the different search queries here. Then, you can come here to last 100 searches, oh my goodness, you guys. All for free. It’s gonna lay this out. You can download it, a CSV file, to allow you to just do a little bit more comparison inside of your marketing. Really, really important though that you catch any of these ones who have zero search results.
So, let’s go here and just randomly do a search for taco and see if that happens to pull up anything in our website, who knows? No results found. Let’s do a refresh here and see it, it tracked it, it said taco was searched once and zero, sad day, results. Oh! my goodness, you guys, this is a really cool plugin for you to be running, super important.
So, what if you don’t already have some sort of a search field? You know that you can go over into your appearance and go to widgets and by default, there’s a search option that you can drag and drop and put into your sidebar or into your footer. This is it right here. Just open that up and you can choose what available widgets will be relevant for your theme, right? You might have different options here based on your theme, but there’s the ability to put that search feature inside anywhere in a widgetized space on your WordPress website. And it will start collecting this content for you, letting you know what your viewers are searching for.
Really cool plugin, right? If you have questions, be sure to contact their support line. Connect with them directly. There might be some Q and A here that will help you troubleshoot, but I didn’t have any issues with it. I was really loving the experience, I hope you did, too. And I hope to see you next WordPress Wednesday. Bye, y’all.
