If you haven’t noticed, Google has been masking keywords in analytics. There were changes made last year that has mean the volume of searches where the keyword is NOT provided has skyrocketed. Currently, Google is hiding over 77% of searches in this category.
What does that mean for SEO practitioners and corporate analytics reports? It means that instead of being bound to the almighty keywords, marketers will have to take an holistic approach to search optimization.
No more resting on the laurels of a strong SERP ranking for a keyword to keep your boss or client happy. It is time to dig a little deeper and see what these people are doing. Yes, in the eCommerce world, marketers have been conversion tracking for years. However, in B2B world where the sales cycle is much longer, strong SEO now means using the right attribution models in analytics and crafting user journeys guided showing engagement.
If that previous task feels a little too complex as a first step, you can start by simply looking at the sessions of users to search landing pages. If you have a good structure to your site and well-formed URLs, you can make some assumptions about what ‘keywords’ are driving traffic to your website. If you are seeing an uptick to a specific page or product, you can probably bet the most dense keywords on that pages are the ones driving traffic. Instead of looking at keyword behavior month over month (MOM), you can now look at user behavior to landing pages MOM.
There are a couple of ways to get at that information. The way I find most effective is to select the “Organic” Segment in Google Analytics, and remove the “All Sessions” segment. From there, select the Landing Pages report under Site Content in the Behavior group. This report shows the pages were your users are starting their website journey when coming from a search engine.
Another report I find useful is looking at the “All Pages” report in the same area. It shows you where users coming from search engines are navigating in your site. If you leave the ‘All Session’ segment selected, it can show if there is a disparity between search users and direct/referral users.
It is a brave new world in search optimization, but it has grown to really mean User Optimization from Search. It is a more complex task, but one that shows the intricacies of your customer. I think that is great opportunity to learn.