Talk to your local SEO guy

I was at the Friends of Figma meetup in Zürich last week, listening to Mario Stipetic talk about data-driven UX decisions. Great talk!

Want to understand what your users actually want? Look at the search terms they typed to find you.

Most of the time, we start analyzing user behavior once they hit our onboarding flow. We fire up the Analytics, Hotjar, watch session recordings, track where people drop off etc…

Someone typing "cheap birthday decorations" has very different intentions than someone searching for "luxury party planning services" Same product category, different mindset. One person wants to save money, the other wants to impress on Instagram.

Your SEO colleague already has this data sitting in their reports. They know exactly what words brought people to your site, which keywords convert best, what questions people are asking. This is especially powerful for B2C products where search intent reveals everything about user motivation and context.

Here's your homework: grab coffee with whoever handles SEO at your company (or get yourself a double espresso if that's you). Ask them what search terms are driving traffic. You might discover more about your users.

Sometimes the best user research is already hiding in Google Analytics.