If you’re tracking site searches in Google Analytics, then you’ve got a pretty good idea of what areas users can’t easily find on your site. This often includes common pages not easily accessible from your main nav, popular pages or products, and recent posts that have gained publicity in the community.
Generally speaking, as long as the page you want to direct users to is near the top of the search results – you’re fine. But for cases where you’re getting frequent hits on the same search terms – or, the terms themselves are really specific (like your top-selling product’s SKU), you might consider adding a redirect to push users directly to those pages.
Surprisingly, this is actually really easy to do.
If you’re using a plugin like Redirection, just enter a redirect for your search URL, like this – /?s=searchterm
. If you aren’t sure what the URL should be, you can test the search on your site and copy the resulting URL.
One important thing to keep in mind is case-sensitivity. Redirection is case-sensitive by default, so if you want to redirect /?s=SearchTerm
as well as /?s=searchterm
, then you’ll need separate redirects.