How 100% (Not Provided) Affects Your SEO Campaign

In our last post, Faryn talked about how “(not provided)” affects your overall digital strategy. In this post, I’m going to cover exactly how this will affect SEO moving forward.

For those unfamiliar, Google has recently announced their intention to increase the percentage of queries being eaten up by “(not provided)” to 100%. This website shows that the day is rapidly arriving.

So how exactly does this affect SEO?

This means that SEO specialists, business owners, or anyone else who has interest in which phrases are driving traffic to their websites will no longer be able to access this data.

Here are two ways this will affect your SEO campaign:

1. Deeper Analysis of Google Analytics

Before “(not provided)”, we were able to report on exactly how many visitors arrived to the website via branded phrases (those including the company’s name) vs unbranded phrases (not including the company’s name).

This was useful as it helped us determine the effectiveness of offline marketing campaigns in some instances (ie. a radio ad directing people to your website). Even further, we could see which types of phrases were bringing in the most traffic and resulting in the most conversions. We could use this data to put a heavier focus on some phrases over others in our efforts.

With this data disappearing completely, we need to dig deeper in Google Analytics to learn more about how traffic is arriving to the website. Rather than seeing which specific phrases drove the most conversions, we’ll instead need to focus on the pages that are generating the most conversions and so forth. Learning what type of content is resulting in the most visitors and conversions will allow us to focus our efforts on producing more of its kind.

We’ll also need to pull data from other platforms such as Google Trends and Webmaster Tools to get a clearer picture of why and how your visitors are arriving to your website.

2. Larger Focus on Conversions

The main focuses of SEO has traditionally been on traffic counts and rankings. Now we have to place a larger focus on the conversions that are being generated by visitors from search.

At the end of the day, this really is the end goal of any business’ website; to get a larger percentage of visitors to take a desired action such as filling out a contact form, purchasing a product, and so on.

This means that SEO will have to work even closer with conversion rate optimization (CRO) as a means of making the website more effective from a conversion standpoint.

Is SEO Still a Valuable Addition to Your Marketing Strategy?

Absolutely. The major difference between the past and where things are headed is that SEO needs to be an integrated aspect of a digital marketing strategy that works closely with conversion rate optimization and search engine marketing to drive optimal results.

Need help crafting a digital strategy that directly increases your bottom line? Contact us today to learn how we can help you.