Anyone who logs into Google Analytics regularly to check on traffic to their website will have noted with concern the increasing percentage of organic traffic being reported as “not provided” ie the keyword data is obfuscated.
Google says that this is for privacy reasons but that is illogical as you can buy the same data if you use AdWords. The reason is financial but coming out and saying “we’ve been giving this away for free for too long so now want to force people to use AdWords” doesn’t sound too good so they pretend it is for privacy reasons – hard to blame them really! There has been a lot of outcry in the SEO space over the past few months about this development. Rand even organised a whiteboard TUESDAY to try to help us come up with alternatives! While not having the data is frustrating, talk of “SEO being dead” is total nonsense. We work with over 200 websites globally and I spend very, very little time agonising over what keywords to target in organic ranks. A well set up AdWords campaign (which every business should have anyway) with as rigorous attribution as you possibly can have in place, will let you know very quickly what keywords are your most valuable. The challenge is not in identifying profitable keywords but rather in attaining ranks for them; I spend lots of time agonising over clients’ ranks!
There is no doubt however that this makes reporting more difficult. Just today, a large client emailed me the following: “Hi Eddie, when I exclude branded and (not provided) traffic is falling.” I was like “eh, why don’t you exclude keywords containing vowels and consonants while you’re at it!” as the reality is that all organic traffic will be (not provided) before long so clearly it is not fair to remove (not provided) when assessing an SEO company’s worth. However, the client does have a point. I pointed to organic traffic growth but knowing what percentage of the growth was branded is now pretty much impossible and this causes difficulties.
However, despite all this, not that much has actually changed. SEO companies will still identify keywords that they wish to target, cluster them, build landing pages and then start hustling for links / social signals. Rank trackers let us know whether ranks are rising or falling and Analytics still tells us what direction our organic traffic is going. If you have identified keywords that you want to rank for, ranks are climbing and traffic is growing, I can’t imagine you’ll be too upset that you don’t know precisely what keywords are driving the growth! With the denudation of the importance of anchor text in links, even when you know this, it’s not like you can do all that much to influence it other than continuing to invest in high quality content and outreach. Don’t get me wrong; I am the strongest proponent of attribution and scientific online marketing that you will meet (currently trawling through E-Consultancy’s 200+ page epic on the subject) but (not provided) simply means that we cannot attribute to keyword level within organic traffic. We can still attribute to channel level so still can put a monetary value on our SEO traffic assuming rigorous attribution is in place.
I would further suggest that most online marketers have not embraced attribution enough to even know the real value of traffic even when they had all the data so getting so upset when it is taken away doesn’t make too much sense. So what do we do tomorrow now that we don’t have this data? The same thing as we did yesterday and will do the day after next…….produce content that people want to consume and earn ranks!
