Transcript of video – adapting to (not provided):
Note: The video is worth watching as I’ll show you exactly what to look for and where. Plus it’s only 6 minutes long with no sales pitch!
Hi everyone, this is Dave Collins from SoftwarePromotions.
Today I’m going to talk about (not provided) and how you can actually deal with this new reality of search engine optimisation.
Now I’m not going to get into the history of (not provided) and I’m certainly not going to start speculating as to why Google effectively hit the accelerator and made this issue explode over the past few days and weeks. The fact is, that’s neither here nor there. The reality is that (not provided) is now here to stay. Keywords are for all intents and purposes a thing of the past.
Now SEOs and online marketers need to understand how we can deal with this.
New strategy:
What we have here is in effect a need for a completely new strategy. The days of going into Google Analytics and just pulling out all that fantastic, rich, nutritious and phenomenally useful keyword information are gone. Instead lets look at the new reality: search engine optimisation for the end of 2013 and beyond.
My new approach is going to consist of the following four steps.
Step one: Google Webmaster Tools.
Now to all intents and purposes, this is as much solid keyword data as we’re going to get from this point on.
Be aware that the figures and some of the facts in the Google Webmaster Tools are not, by any means, 100 percent reliable. However, they are vastly more useful than the simple not provided that goes into the Google Analytics accounts.
Look at the trends over time and pay attention not only to the search queries but also the top pages. You want to get a feel for the keywords that are sending traffic to your website. Which pages are these visitors actually coming to.
Step two: Google Analytics.
Yes, there’s still something useful in Google Analytics for SEOs.
If we filter out organic traffic using an advanced segment; there’s still some useful information. The main two items that I’m interested in is looking at are how much organic search traffic your website is getting over time and I’m looking for trends as they develop. Additionally we’re really interested in which pages on the website are getting from these organic visitors.
Again, we’re not going to get the keywords, but we will see which pages are popular.
Step three: rank tracking.
Now, this is interesting because over the past year or two we’ve seen a trend of people moving away from tracking rank by keyword as a meaningful metric.
With this new change of (not provided), this has once again become quite a useful statistic. So even though we’re not going to see the breakdown of keywords within the analytics data; it’s useful to see which of our obvious keywords are we ranking for and positions – in particular what happens over time.
Did these positions go up? Or did they go down? If so we want to try to join the pieces together to work out why so that we can respond accordingly.
Step four: keyword research.
Now obviously keyword research is already a part of our SEO. The fact is that right now we have some data in our Google Analytics account – from the past month, past three months, past six months, and so on. There’s some some useful keyword data there.
Obviously, with time that source of information is going to disappear to nothing – in fact we’re almost there today.
Keywords do change over time, so ongoing keyword research is going to now become more important. In a sense it’s not going to be something that we just carry out at the beginning of the SEO process when we’re optimising existing content or creating new content. It’s something that we’re going to have to keep on doing throughout, so that we can create optimized content for the keywords and of course track the keywords as well.
Wait a minutes – isn’t something missing here?
Now you may have noticed that the one obvious, so called “solution” that I didn’t refer to is Google AdWords.
The reason for that is I don’t believe that Google Adwords data has a role to play in this process. Why? Because there are a massive number of factors going on within the Adwords account that will affect the data that you can get out of it – such as competition, such as bids, such as budget, geographic distribution and so on.
All of these factors have a bearing on the “facts” that will come out, so I just don’t believe the information that you can pull out of our AdWords account is going to be that useful. It also carries a risk of further clouding the situation, possibly even nudging you towards making some bad decisions.
One last tip:
In your Google Analytics account it’s worth looking at data from the past 12 months and possibly even 24 months or longer. There is still some keyword data that is sometimes useful and relevant. I strongly suggest – as horrible and tedious a task as this is – to dump all of that data and export it into Excel so that you’ve got it. From there I believe it’s worth spending some time cleaning up the list and looking at keywords that are relevant, keywords that you’re interested in, keywords that are relevant. This can be the start of your keyword list that from this point on you’re actually going to start tracking and monitoring the rankings.
So good luck. Get out there. I hope you can adapt to the new reality of SEO quickly and relatively painlessly. Be seen, be sold.
