I first stumbled upon this strategy years back when I was working on a large ecommerce site. The business at the time was running focus groups. The focus groups watched people navigate the website 

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Then people mention difficulties if any they were having navigating the webiste 

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It was shocking to hear the struggles people were having that no one knew existed. But how do we expand this beyond focus groups?

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Turns out GA can be leveraged to track everything people enter in the site search bar. Keep in mind this only works for websites that have a search bar onsite. 

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Here are just a few of the most effective ways I found to leverage site search.

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Find questions people are asking about your products. See what information related to your products are important for people.  Then map it out across the website accordingly.

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Further insight to UX roadblocks. Sometimes people search for a product or information that isn't as visible as it should be. Site search can provide opportunities for content that should be more visible. 

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Finally product development. See tons of people searching for a product you don't have? You now know you have the demand for it. This can also be leveraged on affiliate websites for new product content ideas.  

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Now to the fun part. When people search online it has a specific url parameter. This url parameter for most starts with “?s=”.  But you can run a search in your website and look at the search bar to be sure. See below example from addidas.

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Then enter the parameter in GA to see all the related searches.  Site search data can also be viewed in GA4 by navigating to Reports>>>>Behavior>>Site Search

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If you don't already have site search tracking and want it. Below are helpful instructions to set it up. 

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Set up site search for GA4

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Set up site search tracking for universal analytics

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