Five People Searched My Site for Solitary and Found Nothing

Five different people came to my site this month, typed the word solitary into the search box, and found nothing.

Not a bad article. Not an old article. Nothing.

I know that because I own the search box.

The question most site owners never ask

Everybody watches what people click.

Almost nobody watches what people looked for and did not find.

Clicks tell you what you already wrote. Searches tell you what you should have written. That second list is the better one, and on most websites it goes straight into the trash.

If your site lives on a rented platform, you probably never see it at all. The platform keeps it. The platform uses it. You get a dashboard with whatever they decided to show you.

What I built

The search page on this site is mine. It runs on code I control, it logs into a database I control, and once a day a script on my own server counts what came through.

That last part matters. A search log is a list of what people were worried about at two in the morning. You treat it like it is somebody else's private business, because it is.

So I count words. I do not keep stories.

What it said this month

Here is a slice of the last thirty days, by distinct visitor, as of this morning.

Site searches, distinct visitors, last 30 days

Source: realryannichols.com site search log, owner report generated 2026-10-07, counts only ↗

I left people's names off this chart on purpose. A few of the top searches are last names, and those belong to real people who did not ask to be on a graph.

Thirty-nine people searched jail. I have written about jail. They found something.

Five searched solitary. As of this morning, my own report flags that word as a gap. No published post answers it.

That is not a traffic problem. That is a to-do list somebody else wrote for me, for free.

How to do this on your own site

You do not need what I built to start. You need three things.

One. A search box that lives on your domain. If people can only find your stuff by scrolling a feed on somebody else's app, you will never know what they came looking for.

Two. A place the searches land that you can read. A table, a spreadsheet, a log file. If you run a normal website, Google Search Console will also show you the searches that brought people in from Google. That is the outside view. Your own search box is the inside view. You want both.

Three. A habit of reading it. Once a week, pull the list. Ignore the obvious. Look for the word that keeps showing up with nothing behind it.

That word is your next page.

The part people skip

Do not chase every term.

Some searches are a person's name and you should not build a page around somebody who never asked to be your subject. Some are private, and you will know it when you see it. Some just do not fit what you do.

Use the ones that fit honestly. Leave the rest alone.

A search log is a gift from people who trusted your site enough to ask it a question. Treat it that way and it will tell you exactly what to build next.