What You Likely Didn’t Know About Google Search

Is this something to be alarmed about?  What could be so significant about Google search?  You type some words in, and the Google search engine goes and finds stuff it electronically matches to it’s massive website database, and you hope it is relevant to you.

But something has changed that is significant for you, as a business owner, using search data to improve your results, improve your content, and get more buyers using the search engines.  Google has gone secure!

Maybe you’re thinking, “aren’t they already secure?”  Well, now they are.  Your searches are now totally through a secure interface. This means that the search engine keywords that used to be passed to your domain so you could see what words and phrases web viewers were using to find your site are longer visible through your website data.

So it’s true that using fully secured search is good for the searcher.  However, for you the business owner, it means the keyword data is no longer available in your Google analytics.

Google began moving more and more to secure searches in 2010.  It has now gone from re-directs in the US to secure search, to global secure search only.  It used to affect only the people logged into Google.  Now it affects all searches.

Initially, the transition caused you to see information “not provided” in occasionally in your analytics data.  The frequency of this result has been steadily increasing.

Now, it is what you will see for all search results and is the standard.  Many agencies are reporting seeing the “not provided” tag 80 to 90% of the time.

How to Beat the “Not Provided” Tag

How to Use Google Webmaster Tools. Yes, I’ve told you many times in many ways to get a Google Webmaster Tools account for your websites.  Did you listen?  Well if you want to see your data, it is time you listened.

In your Webmaster Tools, you can see your historical data for the past 90 days. It does not show you everything, but it does show the top 2,000 results.  For most websites, this is more than everything.  So this is an increase in data from 1,000 results provided over 30 days previously.

To see how to link your website to your Webmaster Tools, go here.

Grouping Keywords on Target Pages.  A highly effective strategy used at my SEO agency  is first doing very extensive keyword research, mapping keywords to URLs and then grouping the keywords on the page.  This allows us to optimize the content on your website, by page so the appropriate, most profitable and relevant keywords are targeted.

By doing this, you can then analyze every web page visit and not be left guessing what the “not provided” data is.  This way each page has it’s own assigned group of keywords which are optimized, but not over optimized, and there are no link schemes.

Landing Page Traffic Analysis.  Because your ability (and mine) to analyze keyword data is becoming nearly impossible, the best thing is to analyze your landing page traffic.  So you can do this in Google analytics by filtering the “not provided” keyword data by landing page.  This gives you a good idea what content your visitors are landing on.

By having groups of keywords for every page, and knowing which pages visitors are landing on, you have a great idea which keywords remain effective.  You will have a good idea of the value of your content on every page. You can define your visitors success by traffic, goal completion, and page performance.

Looking at SEO a Different Way

At ThinkBigandGrow Media and other online marketers must adjust the way they see SEO and this means adjusting your strategies and expectations over the long term.  This means your thinking and mine must go beyond keywords in order to evolve and compete at the highest level.

My company, ThinkBigandGrow Media stays on top of the curve to ensure we can see and use what is available to ensure peak results long into the future. This enables providing compelling and high value content that will actually drive conversions and sales.

Are you ready for the change?