Andy McIlwain @ andymci.com

“Search is the world’s largest focus group.” A while ago, someone said this to me (I can’t remember who, but buy yourself an eclair if it’s you: you’ve earned it), and it struck me as pure brilliance. We tend to get so focused on the challenge of showing up in search results that we frequently forget that we’re bringing real people with real needs to our website, and unlike other traffic sources, these people have already told us exactly what they’re looking for. Searchers are an analyst’s dream because of this fact: in many cases, we know why they came to our site, and this helps us put their actions into some sort of context.