ways to survive the not provided trap by christine churchill

Ways to

Survive the

Not

Provided

Trap

Copyright 2013 KeyRelevance LLC 1

SMX East

Christine Churchill

President, KeyRelevance@KeyRelevance

@ChrisChurchill

• 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

Speaker: Christine Churchill

Copyright 2013 KeyRelevance LLC

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


Then Things Went Dark


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


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


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


Traditional Sources of Keyword Data

• Site analytics for converting keywords 85%

• Site analytics for frequent words 54%

• Internal site search 46%

• Competitors’ sites 36%

• Competitive intelligence tools 34%

• Exploring long search phrases 31%

• Social semantic mining 15%

• Keyword suggestion tools 15%


Source: MarketingSherpa Survey 2009


Approaches

for Capturing

Lost

Keyword

Insights

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”


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

• Costs money


Option 3 – Analytics Top 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

• Landing page optimization pays off



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.

Option 5 – Use Competitive Intelligence Tools

on Your Own Site

• Many Competitive

Intelligence tools get their

data from a variety of

sources – not dependent on

Google

• The tools allow you to enter

a domain and the tool will

tell you the keywords

bringing the domain traffic

• Example tools include

Searchmetrics, SpyFu,

SEMRush, KeywordSpy,

and Compete


Competitive Intelligence Tools


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


GWT Top Queries Data


GWT provides up to

90 days of query

data and up to 2000

termsSort by Clicks to see the

terms that actually

brought the most traffic

to the site

If you click on the query,

it shows which pages

appear for the term

Using Filters can separate

brand/non-brand and core

terms, plus sources from web,

image, mobile, & video

GWT Top Pages


Sort by clicks

to find which

pages

brought the

most traffic.

Can click on

Page URL to see

which terms the

page ranked for

Super Important Tip

• The GWT query data defaults to web data

• To use the corresponding SEO query data in

Google Analytics, you MUST FILTER for

Google Property Web!

– Otherwise you get image, mobile, video and web

search all mixed together


Biggest Limitation of Using GWT

• GWT provides impressions and click ranges,

but has no connection between traffic and

performance

• “I know this query brought someone to my

site, but I have no way of knowing what they

did after arriving”

• Publishers want to provide content that

answers searchers’ questions, not one click

visits


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, Searchmetrics, SEMRush

• Google Instant, UberSuggest, Soovle


Wish list for Keyword Tools

• Year or longer keyword data In webmaster tools data

• Create option for automatic monthly email of

keywords

• Include seasonal trend data in Keyword Planner

• Allow for breakout of mobile devices in Keyword

Planner

• Make a version of kw tools accessible without login

• Give back option for phrase and broad match for

search volumes in Keyword Planner

• On Bing Keyword Tool – allow for longer lists in UI

• Give back keyword data (or at least let us buy

it)


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

combination of workarounds

and multiple tools to make up

lost data



Thank You!

Christine Churchill

www.keyrelevance.com

[email protected]

@KeyRelevance

@ChrisChurchill

http://twitter.com/appstotweet

ways to survive the not provided trap by christine churchill

Technology

site copyright

keyrelevance llc source

gwt data

queries data copyright

site search data downside

pages copyright

gwt copyright

limited data