Now You See It. Now You Don’t.

Alert: Google Hides Keywords!

It wasn’t long ago you started seeing a few ‘not provided’ when looking at keyword reports in your website analytics.  Google has recently decided to eventually expand that to all searches.  Which means that your analytics reports will no longer tell you which organic (SEO) keywords shoppers are using to find you.

Why are they doing it?

Much speculation and many  ‘conspiracy theories’, but Google is really about two things… providing quality search results and making money.

We’ve mentioned previously the changes by Google in how they determine relevancy, authenticity, and authority that make your site pages rank well.  Their goal is noble: get better results for searches.  This resulted in changes with our SuperiorSEO services to an ‘inbound’ approach which we revealed in All Aboard the Google Train.

The other reason is truly financial.  Google wants to make money and they do that through Pay Per Click (PPC/AdWords).  Good news … all the keyword analytics are still intact in your PPC accounts and when utilized correctly, can still be of great advantage with your organic ranking efforts.

What do you need to do?

Bottom line … you want qualified shoppers to find you for the products and services you offer and those brands, models, and services are all made up of keywords. In order to make educated decisions on where your best efforts should be applied, having access to keyword data is critical.  It ensures your site content, blogging energies, and link marketing time and money is invested correctly over time.

There are many tools available online to help you ‘find your keyword data’, but be cautious as they can use ‘fuzzy logic’ to just ‘make you look good’.  If are you running PPC advertising it has a helpful tool as well as Moz.com. Google’s Webmaster Tools will still provide some bits and pieces as well.

If you participate in SuperiorSEO with us, we already have these and other helpful tools in place to help make wise decisions about your online marketing.

As always, we are here to help when needed.  Give your client service specialist a shout any time with a question or for more information on how SuperiorSEO may benefit your dealership’s success.

If you are really into the techy side of online marketing you can watch a great explanation of these recent changes by Rand Fishkin from Moz.