The report most teams never read
Almost every website with internal search has access to a search terms report. It shows what users typed into the search bar before finding (or not finding) what they needed. It's one of the most direct signals available about where your navigation is failing.
Most teams never look at it.
The search terms report isn't glamorous. It's not a dashboard with graphs. It's a list of words and phrases, often messy and misspelled, sometimes bewildering. But that list is a live record of user intent, and reading it systematically can tell you more about your site's information architecture than months of analytics review.
What internal search data actually reveals
Every search on your site is a small navigation failure. The user arrived at your site (or navigated to a section of it) and could not find what they needed through the menus, links, and page structure you provided. They fell back to search.
The search report tells you:
None of this requires expensive user research tools. It requires reading a report.
How to access site search data in GA4
If your site uses Google Analytics 4, search terms are captured when users interact with a site search box. GA4 requires a brief setup to track search queries.
Enabling site search tracking
In GA4, go to Admin → Data Streams → [your stream] → Enhanced Measurement. Make sure "Site search" is toggled on. GA4 will automatically capture search terms from URL query parameters containing common parameter names (q, search, query, keyword, etc.).
If your site uses a custom query parameter, go to Admin → Data Streams → [your stream] → Configure tag settings → Show more → Internal traffic and scroll to the site search settings to add your parameter.
Finding the search terms report
In the GA4 interface: Reports → Engagement → Events, then filter for the view_search_results event. You can also find search term data in Reports → Life cycle → Engagement → Events and drill into search_term as a dimension.
For cleaner analysis, create an Exploration: Explore → Blank → Add dimension: Search term → Add metric: Event count.
Export the full list to a spreadsheet for analysis.
Analyzing the data in a spreadsheet
Once you have the raw list, organize it by volume (most searched first) and work through these classification categories:
Category 1: Navigation failures
These are searches for things that clearly exist on your site but are hard to find through menus. Users searching for "contact us," "business license application," or "parking permit" on a site that has all of those things are telling you those paths aren't obvious.
Action: Add the term directly to your main navigation, improve label clarity on existing links, or add a prominent shortcut to the highest-traffic destination pages.
Category 2: Content gaps
These are searches for things your site genuinely doesn't have. If a municipal website gets repeated searches for "snow removal complaint" and there's no page or form for that, that's a missing service.
Action: Build and publish the missing content. Prioritize by search volume.
Category 3: Language mismatches
These are searches where users use different words than your site uses. A government website that labels a section "Civic Operations" but gets searches for "garbage pickup schedule" has a language mismatch. Users speak in plain, task-oriented language. Sites often speak in organizational language.
Action: Update navigation labels, page titles, and headings to use the language your users use. Add the user-language terms as synonyms in your content.
Category 4: Feature or service confusion
These are searches that reveal users don't understand how your site is organized. Repeated searches for "online forms" on a site with lots of forms suggests users can't find them through normal navigation. Searches for "PDF" or "download" suggest users expect downloadable content that isn't easy to locate.
Action: Review the top results for these searches and ensure they're surfaced prominently in the relevant sections.
Building a prioritization matrix
Not all search improvements are equal. Use this framework to prioritize:
Run this analysis quarterly and incorporate the findings into a reporting dashboard for leadership. Search patterns shift as your site changes, as external events drive traffic, and as your services change over time.
What to do when you can't change the navigation
Sometimes improving the navigation itself isn't immediately possible (it may be in an off-limits CMS section, or navigation changes require a longer design and review process). In those cases:
The goal isn't always to eliminate search. It's to ensure that when users do search, they find what they need, and to reduce the number of searches that end in frustration.
Pairing search data with zero-results data
Zero-results reports show what users searched for and found nothing. GA4 captures this through custom events if your site is set up to fire an event when search returns zero results. If you don't have this, your CMS or search platform may have its own reporting.
Zero-results data is the most urgent category: these are users who tried to find something, couldn't, and have no obvious path forward. They're almost always going to leave the site unsatisfied.
Review zero-results patterns quarterly and treat the top terms as critical content or navigation gaps.
If you want help analyzing your site's search data and turning it into a concrete IA and content improvement plan, get in touch and we can make that report actually useful.