Online marketers have invested heavily into sophisticated SEM and SEO techniques to drive traffic to their sites, and most are adept at creating and optimizing landing pages for a good percent of our audience. But there's not enough time in the day to create a custom landing page for every paid search term, and no one can control where a customer lands via organic search.

Surges in new search behavior, called "micro-trends," can appear in a matter of hours or even minutes — for example, the impact of Michael Jackson's tragic death on music sales or searches for snow blowers during a blizzard. Marketers that want to maximize their search ROI must do more to capture the analytics opportunity of this dynamic search behavior. This requires moving to a real-time analytics model — analyzing individuals' immediate behavior when searching, browsing and clicking to deliver highly-relevant content at every minute.

Real-time analytics technologies allow retail sites to capture visitors' immediate behavior to deliver in-the-minute personalized product suggestions on any page — responding to the individual search terms and reducing the number of custom landing pages needed. What's more, real-time analytics help marketers capitalize on search microtrends by dynamically adapting the products presented throughout the shopping cycle to the surging interest.

Here's an example of real-time analytics in action. When a searcher looks for "Ryobi drill" and clicks a paid or organic search link to get to your site, he should see results for the five leading drills you sell — not just land on a generalized category page for drills, hardware or tools. If the landing page is direct-to-product, which can be as much as 40% of some site-traffic, the consumer should be presented with recommendations related to his search term.

Traditional analytics packages are fundamental and necessary for developing a SEO and SEM budget. But to maximize your investment in SEO and SEM, show your customers exactly the products they want in real-time.
If you give consumers what they want, sales move only in one direction: up.

This article originally ran as part of the December 14, 2009 Technique, "Unleash the power of search and analytics." To read the entire feature, click here.