Ways to Survive Google's Not Provided Keyword Trap By Christine Churchill, KeyRelevance

Ways to
Survive the
Not
Provided
Trap
Christine Churchill
President, KeyRelevance
@KeyRelevance
@ChrisChurchill

Copyright 2013 KeyRelevance LLC

1

Speaker: Christine Churchill
• President of KeyRelevance, LLC
• Member of Founding Board of Directors of
Search Engine Marketing Professional
Organization (SEMPO)
• Member of the Board of Directors of the
Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing
Organization (DFWSEM)
• Columnist at Search Engine Land & Web
Marketing Today

• Longtime Speaker & Instructor, Search Engine
Strategies, PubCon, and Search Marketing
Expo Conferences
• Over 15 years online marketing experience


Once Upon a Time…
….When visitors landed on your
site from search results
pages, Google would report all
the referring keywords in
Analytics

Site owners used the keyword
data to improve the user
experience on their site and to
provide visitors with pages for
which they were searching


3

Then Things Went Dark


4

Then Things Went Dark
On 18 Oct 2011, Google stopped providing
keyword data for logged in organic
visitors
Then on 23 Sept 2013, Google stopped
providing keyword data for ALL organic
visitors


5

The Referral Keyword Data Loss Issue

• Biggest change in
SEO and Keyword
Research to date

• Means site owners
and marketers don’t
have insight into the
specific keywords
visitors typed into the
search engine that
brought them to their
site

6

Lost Keyword Data Facts

• Applies to ALL Google organic searches
• Means webmasters will not know keywords
organic visitors typed into Google search engine
• Does not apply to PPC Search clicks
• Can STILL get keyword data from Bing and other
search engines as well as limited data from GWT


7

Traditional Sources of Keyword Data
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Site analytics for converting keywords
Site analytics for frequent words
Internal site search
Competitors’ sites
Competitive intelligence tools
Exploring long search phrases
Social semantic mining
Keyword suggestion tools

85%
54%
46%
36%
34%
31%
15%
15%

Source: MarketingSherpa Survey 2009


Approaches
for Capturing
Lost
Keyword
Insights


9

Option 1 – Use Bing Data
Look at Bing Keywords in Analytics
– Bing market share 17.9%in August 2013 compared to
Google’s 66.9% (comscore)
– Bing provides all keyword information
– “Your data, always fully provided”


10

Option 2 – Use PPC
• PPC keyword data not
affected, so use
performance data from
there
• Assumes keywords that
work well in PPC are
good words to target
organically
• Assumes the behavior
of visitors from the
different sources is the
same

11

Option 3 – Analytics Landing Pages
• Review which landing pages are getting
traffic in analytics
• See where the page is ranking in the SERPS
• You can usually tell the keyword theme of the
page – you may not know specific keyword
phrases, but can get close by looking at the
optimization
• Labor intensive, doesn’t scale


12

Option 4 – Use Site Search Data

Site Search Box
• Reveals keywords and
expressions that visitors
are actually using /
wanting
• Acts as a direct feed from
the visitors brain
• Make sure you collect site
search data
Downside is data is limited and site search is usually a
fall back when users can’t find what they are looking for
on your site.

13

Option 5 – Use Competitive Intelligence Tools
on Your Own Site
• Many Competitive Intelligence tools get their
data from a variety of sources – user panels,
scraping, etc.
• The tools allow you to enter a domain and the
tool will tell you the keywords bringing the
domain traffic.


14

Option 6 - Use GWT KW Data
Advantages:
– Shows ALL KW, impressions, and clicks
– Impressions w/out clicks might indicate a Title/Meta
Description/Snippet issue
Disadvantages:
– Cannot break out data by other segments (KW leading
to conversions, for example) so data is not highly
actionable
– Mapping KW to landing page is tedious 1-at-a-time
process – not useful for large scale KW analysis
– Requires you to download reports regularly since GWT
data expires in 90 days

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Option 7 - Use Keyword
Tools for Brainstorming
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Google Keyword Planner
Google Trends
Bing Keyword Tool
Bing’s Ad Intelligence Excel Plug-in
Wordtracker
KeywordDiscovery
WordStream
Compete, SpyFu, SEMRush
Google Instant, UberSuggest, Soovle

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The Bottom Line
•

Site Owners lost an important
source of keyword
performance information with
the loss of referral search
query data

•

No perfect workaround

•

Recommend using several
workarounds


Thank You!

Christine Churchill
www.keyrelevance.com
info@keyrelevance.com
972-429-1222
@KeyRelevance
@ChrisChurchill

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Ways to Survive Google's Not Provided Keyword Trap By Christine Churchill, KeyRelevance

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Ways to Survive Google's Not Provided Keyword Trap By Christine Churchill, KeyRelevance