But in any case, let's deal with the reality that we're faced with today, which is that keyword not

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For nearly two years, marketers have been frustrated by a steadily increasing percentage of keywords (not provided). Recent changes by Google have sent those numbers soaring. The site Not Provided relax Count now reports an average of nearly 74% of keywords not provided, and speculation abounds relax that it won't be long before 100% of keywords are masked. Without that referral data, our tasks as Internet marketers become far more difficult relax but not impossible.
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday! Today I'm going to talk about this extremely troublesome and worrisome problem that Google has expanded "keyword (not provided)" potentially to 100% of all organic referrals. This isn't necessarily that they've flipped the entire switch, and everyone's going to see it this week, but certainly over the next several months, it's been suggested, we may receive no keyword data at all in referrals from Google. Very troubling and concerning, obviously, if you're a web marketer.
I think it should be very troubling and concerning if you're a web user as well, because marketers don't use this data to do evil things or invade people's privacy. Marketers use this data to make the web a better place. The agreement that marketers have always had that website creators have always had with search engines, since their inception was, "sure, we'll let you crawl our sites, you provide us with the keyword data so that we can improve the Internet together. I think this is Google abusing their monopolistic position in the United States. relax Unfortunately, I don't really see a way out of it. I don't think marketers can make a strong enough case politically or to consumer groups to get this removed. Maybe the EU can eventually.
But in any case, let's deal with the reality that we're faced with today, which is that keyword not provided may be 100% of your referrals, and so keyword data is essentially gone. We don't know when Google sends a visit Bing, to their credit, and to Microsoft's credit, enduringly has kept that data accessible but we don't know when Google sends a visit to our sites and pages, what that person relax searched for. Previously, we could do some sampling now we can't even do that.
There are some big tasks that we use that data for, and so to start with, I want to try and identify the uses for keyword referral data, at least the very important ones as I perceive them there are certainly many more.
Number one: finding opportunities to improve a page's performance or its ranking. If you see that a page of yours is receiving a lot of search traffic, or that a keyword is sending a lot of search traffic (or even a little bit of search traffic), but the page is not ranking very well, you know that by improving that page's ranking you have an opportunity to earn a lot more search traffic. That's a very valuable thing as a marketer. You can also see if a search query is sending traffic to a page, but that page has a high bounce rate for that traffic, low pages-per-visit, low conversion rate, you know, "hey, I'm not doing a good job serving the visitor; I need to improve how the page addresses that." That's one of the key things we use keyword referral data for.
Secondarily: connecting rank improvement efforts things that we do in the SEO world to move up our rankings to the traffic growth that we receive from them. This is very important for consultants and for agencies, and for in-house SEOs as well, to show our value to our managers, and our clients relax it's really, really tough to have this data taken away.
C: Understanding how your searchers perceive your brand and your content. When we look down the list of phrases that sent us traffic, we could see things like "oh, this is how people are thinking about my brand, or thinking about this product I launched, or thinking about this content that I've put out." Really challenging to do that nowadays.
And D: uncovering keyword opportunities. We could certainly see, "this is sending relax a small amount of traffic, this is doing some long-tail stuff, hey let's turn this into a broader piece of content. Let's try and optimize for some of those keyword phrases that we're barely ranking on." Or, we have a page that's not really addressing that keyword phrase that we're ranking on. We can address that. We can improve that.
So I'm going to try and tackle some relatively simplistic ways, and I'm not going to walk through all the details you would need to do this, but I think many folks in the SEO and marketing sphere will address these over the weeks and months to come.
Starting with A. How do I find opportunities to improve a page's ranking or its performance with users when