When Google announced a couple of days ago that they were going start making SSL encrypted search the default for users on all their local domains (such as .co.uk), webmasters around the world might have thought they would have a bit of time to prepare for the arrival of the imminent “not provided” keyword data. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case as it seems as logged in users with Google are being automatically redirected from https://www.google.co.uk to httpss://www.google.co.uk.
The seemingly innocuous addition of the ‘s’ on the end of ‘https’ will have anything but innocuous results for Dental SEO agencies, webmasters and online businesses all over the UK. It means that logged in users are now being redirected to the secure version of Google, which results in no search query data being passed on to the website owner whose result you click.
For example, imagine you are logged into Google and you search for ‘search engine optimisation’ and then click on the link pointing to the Dental SEO Company website. Before this change, your visit would be recorded in the analytics report that you had come to our website using the keyword ‘search engine optimisation’, but now, it will register your visit under the keyword “(not provided)”.
This has several repercussions for the website in question. The main concern is that over time, as the percentage of “not provided” traffic grows, it will be increasingly difficult to establish how the website is performing for the targeted keyword. It also means that site owners are unable to analyse the longtail keywords that are sending traffic to their sites, which would be a great loss to blog websites, or websites that hosts blogs.
I posted a blog yesterday detailing how we can use analytics to negate the impact of the “not provided” keyword, and I still stand by that blog, that there are things we can do to work around this missing keyword data. However, the fact of the matter is that this data is missing, and even with all the guesswork and analytical analysis in the world, that data isn’t coming back.
Still, at Dental SEO Company we focus on the positives. I suggest that if you are concerned about the impact of the “not provided” keyword on your Dental SEO efforts, you print the following matra, stick it to your desk, put it as your desktop wallpaper, print it on a t-shirt, shout it from the rooftops, or put it on a placard and go on a march:
Focus on the information you do have, rather than worrying about the data you don’t!
Google Analytics is still one of the richest sources of information an inbound marketer or website owner could hope to have, so focus on that utilising that information to improve the performance of your site, rather than fretting about a loss of keyword data!
