How Google Plans to Increase Keyword Encryption

Here’s the Latest on Google’s Keyword Encryption Policy

For the past several years, Google has increasingly chosen not to report the keyword used by a searcher to the website the searcher ends up visiting. Google’s reasons for this are ostensibly security-related (they want to protect the privacy of their users). However, they have been accused of using this year’s national news coverage of alleged data sharing with governmental organizations to make a change that, in effect, will push more marketing focus to paid search media, such as Adwords.

Regardless of Google’s motives, though, the reality for marketers is that such keyword data is likely to disappear completely from web analytics reports in the near future and may never return. Many marketers will seek to work around this problem by extrapolating trends from the organic search data you do have. Although no marketer claims that search referral patterns from Yahoo/Bing are identical to those from Google, for the time being at least, we have search keyword data from these other search engines that can help show trends in traffic, that is, which segments of our keyword selections are driving the most traffic, which ones are increasing and decreasing. Extrapolating from other search engines is far from a bad idea, but it also represents a more reactive, tactical change rather than a strategic one.

Strongpages develops organic search programs that are insulated from changes like this with Google because we focus on the content and our client’s value proposition in the marketplace instead of on Google’s algorithm du jour or changes that it chooses to make regarding data it shares with marketers. A cornerstone of our work is that we always associate a single target keyword with a single target landing page. This means that traffic coming in to a particular page is usually quite related to the content published on the landing page and that measuring the impact of SEO by landing page entrances is roughly equivalent to measuring it based on search referral keywords.

Marketers should always build their digital strategy from their content outward: What is the message you want to communicate to your target marketplace? Publish that content, and make it the best page of content on the web for that topic, so that – regardless of what Google’s algorithm changes are now or in the future – you are giving the search engines themselves the best of all reasons to rank you #1. Once your content is published, segment and microsegment your audience so that the message each visitor to your site receives is personalized and purposeful, with a strong call to action to the next step in your marketing funnel. Such content-focused SEO programs are cut from a different cloth than the traditional (and historically futile) “meta data + link building” process that so many firms deploy.

Google’s data sharing changes may be for the purposes of improving security or driving more people to Adwords or both, but regardless, marketers can best improve their programs by focusing on content-driven SEO and content-centric KPIs that work regardless of what Google does and that represent marketing metrics that are more relevant and closer to the point of sale.