Have you ever thought about the importance of the query chains analysis to discover and understand the people’s way of thinking?

Once you have a look at the database of the server where your search engine software is hosted into, you see that people searching your website often perform a sequence of queries to refine the search results in order to match them better with their needs or wants.

Because of this, by analyzing a high volume of query chains we can take advantage of collective intelligence from consumers in reformulating searches and get their implicit feedback to draw the customers’ mental models.

In other words, query chains are very powerful tools to dig in the people intents and finally collect unlimited data about their habits at very low cost. This way, we can move from the high level idea or concept thru the ultimate common people’s related goal.

Then we can use this information to develop consumer-tailored communication, support activities, marketing/commercial actions and products features:

• more accurate content based on searches (to match our product and services with consumers’ needs by a properly-focused communication)
• contents, messages and communication are aligned with customer vocabulary
• properly assisted in terms of information, messages and call-to-action hot spots when it comes to take a purchase decision in our website

Other approach to get and draw the sequence of searches relies on setting up human users tests, recording their queries and then asking them to explicitly provide feedback on retrieved documents. UX experts use to go ahead with these kind of tests. This solution is very expensive in time and money and make significant amount of such data difficult to obtain.

Query chains analysis is also really helpful to define more targeted Findability strategies. It provide you with relevant context to build a holistic digital and physic approach.