While doing research for a recent trip to Europe I kept noticing some of the small differences in language that came up. One of my favorite conversations was with a woman working for a car rental company. For a product as globally ubiquitous as the automobile, it's interesting how many parallel terms we have for the same thing. A 'bonnet' is a 'hood', a 'boot' is a 'trunk' and a 'lorry' is a 'truck'.

I've known these terms for a while, but I did learn a new one - 'estate' is another word for a 'station wagon'.

It would be interesting to check out the internal search terms for that car rental Web site. I bet a segment based on the term 'estate' would overlap pretty well with a segment of visitors from Europe. An even more interesting comparison would be to find out the conversion rate between visitors who searched on 'sedan' versus 'saloon' or 'station wagon' versus 'estate'.

Web sites with internal search available to their customers are loaded with information from their visitors and it's just waiting to be investigated. Every time a visitor does a search, you can assume two things: 
a) they are interested in the search term; 
b) they haven't found what they are looking for.

With this in mind, you can begin to investigate several questions:

• Which areas of your site are not being used because people aren't finding them quickly? If so, maybe it's time to rework the navigation.
  


• Are there any products or services that customers consistently search for but that you don't offer? Any searches for 'gift wrapping' at your online toy store? Are there potential customers at the other end of those searches for 'belts' on the shoe store Web site?
  


• How closely do your internal search terms match paid search terms? Terms with high on-site activity or conversion rates are likely to be effective in paid search as well.

For more detailed information about how to analyze and use data from your Web site's internal site search, check out this article in the ClickTracks Support Center Knowledge Base: http://support.clicktracks.com/clicktracks/article.php?id=106.

Oh, one last bit of decoding - it turns out that 'Milanese cutlet' is just a chicken fried steak. I think a Big Mac is still a Big Mac though.

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