With digital marketing as my day job, I’m constantly analyzing user behavior and activity so that the company I work for can offer the best experience for people who are searching for our services.  A lot of time is spent in two programs called Google Analytics and SEMRush, where I see how people are looking for those services, identifying trends, and developing strategies to best advertise to them.  While the deep dive into data is a lot of fun to nerds like me, most people don’t care about the details of search metrics and usually just like to know how their site is doing in terms of overall traffic.  That’s well and good information to have, but it’s also where you miss out on one of my favorite metrics – search queries (bear with me; I promise this is going somewhere).

Search queries are the exact terms that people type into search engines that trigger your website to show up in results.  If someone clicks on your site, then it shows up in a report.  This information can then be used to know what exactly people are looking for and if your website is getting their attention or not.  This goes a lot deeper into search engine optimization and such, but overall this report is a list of how people are finding you.  The reason it’s one of my favorite metrics is that because of all the words on your website, people are bound to make your site show up in search results in some unexpected ways.

Relevant Searches

When turned on this website, thankfully I’ve been doing my job right and the most popular searches for us have been things like:

• fun dmc band
• springfield wedding bands
• wedding bands in springfield
• wedding musicians in springfield
• springfield il bands

Blogging Searches

And because we’ve been blogging regularly, a lot of high-trafficked articles we’ve written have been coming up lately as well:

• garter toss songs
• drum riser diy
• bridezilla stories
• 2016 wedding entrance songs
• father daughter dance songs

WTF Searches

But when you dig down past the first few pages of results, you start to get into the odd ones.  I’ve got a good idea as to what on our website is triggering some of these search results, but there are a few that have left me stumped. Either way, they’re fun to visit every so often:

• nothing else matters first dance
• angus young guitar rig
• book maroon 5 private party price
• buffalo hart entertainment -2016 -2015 -2014 -2013 -2012 -2011 -2010 -2009 -2008 -2007 -2006
• fun outdoor places to go near me
• grand wizard
• where are the spice girls from
• bands who play at funerals
• portland heavy metal bands
• yeah yeah dance songs
• songs similar to no diggity
• someone steals garter (–dying to know the story behind this.)
• cheated on me with guitarist
• is stevie wonder blind
• hipster bands
• wedding band sucks