Google to Encrypt ALL Keyword Searches: Say Goodbye to Keyword Data

438
inShare

Warning: This isn't one of those happy news updates that opens up new doors for your marketing -- like Facebook announcing embedded posts. Nope -- this is one that's going to actually close some doors for you. And like Peter Griffin says, it's really going to grind your gears. Yesterday, Search Engine Land reported that Google has made a change aimed at encrypting all search activity -- except for clicks on ads.
When approached by Search Engine Land, Google reportedly confirmed the switch, saying the following:

"We added SSL encryption for our signed-in search users in 2011, as well as searches from the Chrome omnibox earlier this year. We’re now working to bring this extra protection to more users who are not signed in."

This means marketers won't even be able to get keyword data for searches conducted by users who aren't even signed in. (Cue marketers everywhere raising their fists in fits of rage.)
Why, Google ... Why?!
So Google says, the reason for the switch is to provide “extra protection” for searchers. Search Engine Land, however, suspects that Google may also be attempting to block NSA spying activity -- since Google was accused of giving the National Security Agency access to its search data back in June (which it has strongly denied). We also can't help but think that, because Google is encrypting search activity for everything but ad clicks, this is a move to get more people using Google AdWords.

What All This Means 

Okay ... so what does all this mean to you, the marketer? First, here's a quick recap of how we got here ...
You may recall that back in October 2011, Google (citing the reason of privacy), announced it would start encrypting search results for logged-in Google users (including any Google-owned product like YouTube, Google+, Gmail, etc.). This meant that marketers were no longer able to identify which keywords a person who was logged into Google.com searched for before they arrived at your website -- even if they were using a web or marketing analytics platform like HubSpot. And without these keyword insights, marketers would have a much tougher time knowing which keywords to target to achieve greater visibility in search. No bueno.
While Google initially said this would impact less than 10% of all searches conducted, we quickly noticed that percentage rise. In November 2011, we analyzed the keywords of HubSpot's customers to find that more than 11% of organic search traffic was being affected, and by January of this year, we'd found that for the HubSpot website specifically, about 55% of the organic search we got each month was encrypted (and we’d seen that percentage steadily rising by about 4 percentage points each month). Things appeared to be getting more serious.

And other webmasters have been reporting a similar lack of insight. Not Provided Count, which tracks 60 sites to chart the rise of the keyword "(not provided)," has been reporting on the effects of encrypted keywords over time. In the chart below, you'll notice a spike starting around the week of September 4. Today, the chart indicates that nearly 74% of search terms are being encrypted.

Just like we predicted earlier this year, with Google encrypting all keyword data, this means marketers will not just lose some of their Google keyword insights -- they'll lose all of them. While there are still a lot of unanswered questions that Google has yet to address (for instance, when will we lose all this data?), there's still a lot of cause for concern for marketers. How will we know how searchers are finding our websites? How will this affect our content strategies?

So What's a Marketer to Do?

Truthfully, it's hard to say. In terms of preventing Google from making this change, there's likely nothing you can do. We asked a few SEO experts to weigh in on the situation:

Aaron Aders, Co-Founder, digitalrelevance:

"While secure searches may seem frustrating to many SEO marketers, this is actually a great move for our industry. Great SEO today is great content with powerful digital endorsements from relevant and authoritative websites, which results in business results that transcend the keyword conversation.

 

"SEO marketers need to be focused on raising organic traffic as a whole, achieving business objectives like online sales and lead generation, growing branded communities, and earning brand mentions. This move by Google will force SEO marketers to focus on business results rather than keywords -- which is where the focus should be anyway."

Larry Kim, Founder & CTO, WordStream:

"Since SEO-optimized content is generally themed content around a specific topic, you can still track the SEO performance of all of your URL’s. I’d argue that tracking organic content at a page level, rather than an individual keyword level, makes a lot more sense given the recent increases in keyword ranking volatility.

 

"It’s worth noting that the keyword "(not provided)" issue only impacts organic searches. If your company engages in PPC marketing, you can still access a treasure trove of valuable search query data by linking your company’s AdWords account with your Google Analytics account and use that data for future keyword research projects."

Andy Pitre, HubSpot Analytics Product Manager:

"As marketers ourselves, we aren’t too happy about these recent developments. We love having access to as much data as possible, and we love using that data to help create better experiences for our visitors, prospects, and customers. Google’s decision to withhold keyword data undoubtedly makes our jobs as marketers a little bit harder.

 

"But as marketers, we are also accustomed to living in a world where we frequently only have access to incomplete information. A big part of our jobs is to interpret that incomplete data and make the best decisions we can. Search is now one of those places where we only have access to a small part of the story. Our decision-making process in this area will have to adapt to these new circumstances, but it won’t stop us from reaching the customers who are searching for our products and services."

What You Can Do

That being said, you shouldn't feel completely left in the dark about how search affects your marketing strategy. Here are some ways you can still measure and use search data:

• It is still possible to tell how much traffic your website is getting from organic search. Although you might not know the exact keywords, you can still correlate the work you do to optimize your site and create content to increases or decreases in organic search.
• Other search engines like Bing and Yahoo continue to pass along keyword data. According to comScore, at present, Google.com has about 67% of search market share, Bing has 18%, and Yahoo has 11%. Although this will not provide the full picture, analytics tools like HubSpot can continue to show keywords for the 33% of searches that come from search engines like Bing, Yahoo, AOL, Ask.com, etc. This data will give marketers at least some indication of which keywords are the most useful.
• If you use Google AdWords for pay-per-click marketing, connect your company’s AdWords account to your Google Analytics account and use that data for keyword research, as Larry Kim of Wordstream suggests.
• Rank will continue to play a role in helping measure the results of search engine optimization and content creation.

Understanding Google Analytics, Traffic Sources

Traffic Sources, Marketing Channels

At the “Traffic Sources” section in your Google Analytics account, you can see how people found your site. By default, you will see three sources: Search, Referral, and Direct. You can evaluate the effectiveness of each source.

• Search. This is traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. This report also lets you see the breakout between organic and paid search traffic, including AdWords, keywords and campaigns.
• Referral. This source lets you see which domains and pages are referring traffic to your site. For example, if you are an automotive service company and one of your suppliers links to your website as a dealer, it’s likely one of your referral sources will be that supplier’s website.
• Direct. These visitors are those directly typing in your URL or coming to you from a bookmarked page. For example, when you come to Web Marketing Today by typing “webmarketingtoday.com” in your browser, you have become a “direct” source in our Google Analytics account.

Knowing the difference between sources, you can benefit from that information by investing some time and effort. It will pay off.
Most business owners and marketers are driving traffic to their websites through various sources, including:

• Email;
• Paid search;
• Display ads;
• Social media;
• Offline — i.e., radio, newspaper, television.

Utilizing what you see in the different traffic sources can be beneficial to your bottom line. By being proactive you can gain full visibility for these campaigns and channels.  I’ll focus on key points to help you capture clean and comprehensive data to make better marketing and business decisions.

Know Your Channels

Whether your traffic is coming from email, paid search, social media, or elsewhere, it’s important to know where visitors are coming from and why. Often your marketing campaigns provide your visitors with several different ways of coming to you site. By monitoring each of these sources, you’re able to see what is working, and what’s not.
You can track offline-marketing efforts by using vanity URLs, promo codes, or some other unique identifier. It is important in these cases to add parameters to your URL so it can be tracked through Google Analytics.

What to Avoid

The list of potential traffic sources is extensive. The basic premise here is to plan in advance to track your campaign performance. Don’t wait until afterwards, otherwise you’ll have some aggregate — and mostly useless — metrics.
When naming your campaigns and sources, stay away from generic names such as “Campaign 1,” “Campaign 2.” Create a meaningful name for each traffic source and campaign. That way you’re able to refer back to it when monitoring, and easily remember which campaign you’re tracking. For example, you could use “Promo Code: 0512″ for the discount coupon campaign running during the month of May 2012.

Multi-Channel Funnels

In analytics, the last traffic source used is the one that typically gets credited for the conversion. But oftentimes, the visitor has had other interactions with your brand and website. So how do you know which marketing sources were utilized? The “Multi-Channel Funnels” reports in Google Analytics can give you the information on how your marketing channels work together to create sales and conversions. This report tracks the sequences of interactions — including paid and organic search, social networks, email newsletters, custom campaigns and more — within the 30 days leading up to each conversion. To learn more about how to set this up, read “Setting Up Multi-Channel Functions” on the Google Analytics website.

Don't forget to subscribe to my blog!

SEO: 12 Quality Signals that Improve Rankings

Google’s algorithms use numerous signals to determine the relative quality of sites and to fight spam in search results. Unfortunately, companies often unwittingly mimic the characteristics of low quality sites, sabotaging their chances of rankings. Read on to see if you’ve damaged your quality ratings and eroded your ranking potential.

How to Determine ‘Quality’?

Google looks for ways to identify the relative quality of sites, and to quantify those quality elements. This approach derived from its algorithmic history, combined with its long-term dedication to positive user-experience. Each element of user-experience involving conducting searches, using search results, and visiting websites are things that Google attempts to automatically detect and measure. Any quantifiable criteria can be used in composing a quality score for a website.
For instance, website visitors get irked when arriving on a website only to have to wait for pages to compose and display in their browsers. Knowing this, Google added Site Speed as a ranking factor — see Google’s blog post on that topic — in 2010. This enabled Google to use the average page delivery speed on a site to influence rankings — two otherwise equivalent web pages matching a search query might be ranked according to which site is quicker.

Panda and Penguin

During the last twelve months, Google has made strikingly aggressive moves against low-quality sites. These algorithm changes are called the “Panda Updates” and “Penguin Updates.” Panda and Penguin were based upon content analysis and link analysis, although we don’t know all the details of what went into it. Even so, we could see some hints in a very telling post on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, entitled “More guidance on building high-quality sites.” The post provides indications of the sorts of stuff that Google is paying attention to, even though it doesn’t cover the full scope of factors that go into its recent algorithm changes.
I’ve personally reviewed thousands of the types of sites that Google deems “low-quality,” and there are a number of measurable factors that come up again and again — the sorts of factors that Google would almost certainly be using in composing quality scores.

The unfortunate thing is that companies every day are building valid business sites that mimic many of the bad characteristics of low-quality sites for which Google is policing. This is a very bad situation — particularly for newer sites — since having some negative dings against your quality score can impede your ability to rank as high or higher than your competition. It can even result in outright penalization where your site simply doesn’t appear for the searches you need visibility in most.
In this article, I’m supplying you with a list of some of the elements that are frequently signs of good-quality sites when present, or indications of bad-quality sites when missing. Businesses often have reasons for leaving out content on their sites, and since the quality score is a scale of values, having some elements missing might not harm your rankings discernibly, or it could have a minor effect. If all your competitor sites are similarly badly designed, you might all be equally impeded in the search results — in which case, improving your quality score could enable you to suddenly rise further above the crowd.

12 Characteristics of Poor-Quality Sites

• Missing a human face. Internet users often look to see who’s behind an unfamiliar site, since there are valid fears of the cheapie sites that are set up as mere facades to cheat consumers. Actually being able to see that a site has a real human behind the business makes it immediately more trustworthy, and very likely makes it a site with a better conversion rate. So, at least list the names of the owners or main executives that oversee the business on the information pages. Even better, provide a profile page for each major owner, executive, and employee — connected up with LinkedIn profiles, blogs if they have them, Google+, and Twitter pages.
• Missing “About Us” pages. Quite similar to the first element of missing a human face, poor-quality sites often don’t put up an “About” page to tell how the company came to be, what the company does, and who is behind the company. Bona fide company websites sometimes leave this out, assuming they only need to focus on the main meat of what they’re doing and selling. But this is a critical mistake. Your company site should have an About page, and it should clearly convince readers that your company is real, has a history, and has good trustworthy people behind it.
• Missing or malfunctioning “Contact Us” pages. Business sites with no Contact page are often shams, assembled to manipulate Google or to cheat consumers in some way. However, you wouldn’t believe the numbers of real businesses that (a) forget to put up a Contact page, (b) don’t realize a site change moved the Contact page so it now just displays an error page, or (c) they don’t realize that their Contact submission forms are broken. Any of these situations could make your site look like one of the bad guys. Make sure you have a Contact page, label it “Contact — not some other weird or funny name — and make sure it works by testing it periodically.
• Declining to display a street address. Even sites that opt to display a Contact page often will only post a submission form and won’t offer alternate means of contacting the company. Consumers fear sending money to a fly-by-night outfit that might disappear tomorrow, leaving them with no recourse. If you’re a real company, consider placing a real address on your site in at least one place — mainly on the “Contact Us” page. It’s fine to state it’s for mail inquiries only. If you leave it off, it makes consumers wonder what it is you have to hide.
• No “Terms & Conditions” page. This is really for larger companies and larger websites, but all sites should include one. Spammer sites don’t have this, because they’re often breaking laws and subconsciously expect people visiting their sites to be breaking laws as well. They just don’t care. But, Google’s algorithms do care, if you’re a large site with hundreds of pages, so include one to fit in with the respectable sites.
• Nonexistent “Privacy Policy” page. This is the same deal as with the lack of Terms & Conditions pages. But, it’s perhaps even more important since consumers want to know what you’re doing with their data when they land on your site or attempt to contact you. Don’t make them guess.
• Hidden domain registration information associated with the URL. If you want to go for a trifecta of worst practices for appearing open, transparent and trustworthy, decline to (a) provide a phone and address, (b) Contact page, and (c) make your domain registration information private. There are many valid reasons why you might not show one of those elements. But if you do all three at once, you just smack of being an untrustworthy site, and you nearly deserve to be smacked by Google for it.
• Offering or encouraging link exchanges. It used to be more common for sites to include a “Link To Us” page, but, depending on the text you have on such a page, having one could get you penalized. Never offer to link if someone else gives you a link, never offer to sell links on your page, and never mention manipulating Google, ranking in search results, or SEO if you have a “Link To Us” page. Thousands and perhaps millions of the spam websites have variations on this, and it’s easy to detect if you have text on your pages that propose using links for manipulating search results.
• Posting radically unrelated content on the site. Did someone talk you into trying to be a lot more than your site or company was meant to be? Some sites drag in news headlines and syndicated articles willy-nilly, regardless of how inappropriate the topic might be. If your site is displaying a lot of off-topic content, you’ve gone too far and need to chop it down to focus on reasonable content.
• Failure to post a phone number. Just as with the failure to provide a Contact page or address, leaving the phone number off is a major mistake. Why be afraid of letting people speak to you? Again, leaving this off will raise a red flag in consumers’ minds, leaving them to ask, “What might this site or company be hiding?”
• Bad spelling and grammar. Many do-it-yourselfers are saving money by building their own websites. Unfortunately, this can result in mistakes that impact the impression the site may have on visitors. I’ve written about this a few times, such as in my blog post, “Will Google Use Spelling & Grammar As Ranking Factors?” Google’s guidance on building high-quality sites underscored this very thing, proving that Google is interested in these criteria. It makes sense if you’ve seen many of the low-quality sites — a great many of them have been built by non-English speakers that often has text and grammar deficiencies. Even beyond the poor impression it can make, I’ve audited client sites with misspelled product or service names, causing them to lose out on significant amounts of internet traffic as their pages were not exact-match relevant to the majority of searches. So, if you’re writing your own text, ask someone to proof it for you to catch stuff that you might otherwise miss.
• Copyright statements. Scraper sites are often stealing content from upstanding sites, so they don’t have any respect for copyright laws. As such, they typically leave such niceties off of their page footers. However, almost no authoritative sites leave this off. Even if you are casual about whether people take and use content from your site, you might consider adding on a copyright statement on all of your site’s pages, just to make it clear that you consider your site to be high quality, worthwhile content.

These elements are all things that Google’s spiders can see, and they’re easily items that indicate that a site might be suspect, or a bad player.

Summary

Make sure your site doesn’t accidentally send the wrong signals to Google — follow best practices in providing information that consumers look for when determining the trustworthiness of a website and the company behind it. This not only will reassure potential customers, improving your conversion rate once people discover your website, but it might also help you in your search engine rankings.

 Don't forget to subscribe to my blog!

Google Analytics

Google Analytics

If you've started a blog, one of the first things you need to do is set up analytics, ( a way to
track website traffic and statistics.)

To set up your analytics, you must first sign up for a Google account (a Gmail account works just fine). Go to http://www.google.com/analytics and click on the “sign up now” button on the top right corner of the page. You will have the option to sign up for a Google account (if necessary) or proceed with the setup. You’ll be asked for your website address and will be given a snippet of code to insert
into your site.

Once you are set up with Analytics, the sky is the limit. You can track everything from unique visitors to time-on-site to PPC ad success. At the beginning, you’ll probably want to focus on
how much traffic you are getting and where it is coming from.

You will be able to tell if you are getting traffic from referring sites (such as your blog, social media posts, or affiliates) or from organic traffic (searches for your name or other keywords). This data will be crucial as you move forward with specific marketing campaigns and tactics.

Traffic analysis is the foundation upon which to successfully manage your marketing efforts. You’ll know what is working and what isn’t. So go install Google Analytics right now, and have fun watching the numbers grow!