When marketing a web site, either commercially or just for fun, search engines play a big part in driving traffic to your site. Knowing how make search engines work for you is an art in itself, and consulting on the subject puts food on the tables of many an internet specialist.

Of course, it goes without saying that the most effective method of getting your site well listed is to publish the content people are looking for. Content-rich sites like weblogs perform extremely well in search engines. Not all sites are content-orientated, however. One of the main principals employed – especially with sites that perform a marketing rather than a content provision role – is to target set phrases that you think a user will search for, and try an optimize your ranking on those keywords or phrases. Having done this, you then monitor your server logs and see what phrases people are actually using to find your site, and readjust your approach accordingly. It’s incredibly useful to know the search terms visitors are using when they find your site.

However, all this tells you is what you’re already doing right – the users that clicked through found you – it’s like a virtual pat on the back. It doesn’t tell you what traffic you’re missing and who’s not clicking through.

I can see a clear market for companies such as Google to sell you a report (or subscription to a reporting service) that details the searches your site was listed in, but that the user didn’t click through on. Based on this Near Misses report, you could see that, for example, you were consistently showing up on page 6 of searches for certain keywords. Adjust your strategy accordingly, and you could move your site up to a position that will earn you more clickthroughs.

This would offer a totally different method of optimizing your site for the traffic you’re missing, not just the traffic you’re already getting.