This Monday marked a black day for online marketers, internet businesses, SEO specialists, and really everyone who uses the internet as Google has made the most fundamental change EVER impacting visibility of search patterns across the internet.
What did they do?
They have now defaulted all searches (at least within North America) to using SSL servers meaning that the searches are now encrypted so that analytics software (including their own stats presented via webstats) will no longer be able to tell you which keywords people have used or link those keywords to your page results which is the fundamental information required to optimize your content for search engines.
Even more clear, what does this mean?
- Anywhere from 80-95% of search requests will now be “invisible” to everyone but Google AND will most likely not be shared with you (the infamous NOT PROVIDED category in keyword stats) – instead keyword knowledge and targeting will be kept only for those who pay Google to advertise on their Adwords platform
- You will no longer be able to easily find keyword opportunities in your marketplace without spending money on advertising
- You will have much greater trouble tracking the effectiveness of your web pages in targeting general search traffic (because you won’t know which traffic is resulting in higher ranks for your pages and which traffic is converting)
- If you are an SEO consultant, you will have a very tough time proving your value as you have very large gaps in providing your worth to your customers (This one doesn’t really both me as much given that I’ve never been a big proponent of SEO specialists anyway, my interest lies solely in smaller net businesses being able to effectively target their audience which Google has now made much tougher)
To prove my point, go up to www.google.com and search for anything, notice that your connection is automatically redirected to http(s) which is the URL presentation of the fact that your connection is now over an encrypted SSL connection hidden from the eyes of everyone except the owner of the SSL server (Google)
Here’s a popular thread with ongoing discussion on this monumental change…
As much as we all know Google is funded by Advertising and must insure the integrity of the web, I do wonder about this decision.
Won’t websites now become LESS proficient at targeting those who really want the information/content they want?
Top sources of content can now be completely misguided because the page containing the content is no longer optimized for the best-fit search because the site owner is “blind” to how people typically would search for what they want.
How is that serving the best interest of the internet?
Here are 4 ways you can begin to deal with the fallout of the growing “Not Provided” reality we now face:
1. Rely less on SEO and more on social (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc…) as well as affiliate marketing (partner marketing) and close relationships with joint venture partners in your industry. The latter two sources have always been far better sources of traffic than SEO anyway, make sure you ramp up these marketing strategies
2. Be Smart About Watching Your Ranking Data. While ranking data without keyword context is not optimal, you can still segment campaigns where you focus for a month or two on a “bucket” that targets optimization around specific keywords or keyword phrases and make your judgement based on ranking as well as traffic and conversions. Less granular yes, but overall you can still get a pretty good read on your testing.
3. Strategic use of paid advertising. Over the years many people have strayed from paid ads due to increases in pay-per-click or added restrictions on landing pages/quality, etc… It’s time to get back in the saddle and use paid ads (text ads, pay-per-click, or even banner ads) to test your different campaigns – then extend the ones that work into SEO campaigns to expand their reach. Given the tough time pure SEO marketers will have in targeting traffic, this technique will work far better than it has in the past.
4. Tap into keyword research drawn from other search engines. No doubt, Google is the GIANT when it comes to search engines. But there are other search engines that can give you a sense for keyword terms that you may target and test helping to reduce your blind spots
I’m not so sure that Google has thought this through completely, absolutely this will put more money in their pockets as businesses (especially BIG business) that previously threw money at SEO will now move at least some of that money to paid ads – aka Adwords. However, what will this do over the next 1, 2 or 3 years to the results we get back on search? If websites with relevant content can no longer match that content to consumers of that content, don’t we end up with a less effective search engine? How is that good for Google?
Like to hear your comments on this…
