Tag: Internet

How Google’s secure search is hurting analytics

It has been happening since 2011 but ever since Google introduced the ability to use their search engine over a secure (SSL/https) connection, the lack of visibility of search keywords has been steadily increasing culminating with a predicted 70% of search keywords not being reported in September 2013, according to this blog post about Google Query Data Disappearing at an Alarming Rate on the RKG Blog.

This has increased from 43% only as far back as July 2013. So why is this happening and what impact is it having on analytics?

Google has been moving users to the SSL version of their secure search result pages to ensure the privacy of their users and ensuring that prying eyes cannot listen in on what users are searching for. They seem to have stepped up this tactic ever since the public has been made aware of various hacks and leaks to WikiLeaks.

The impact this is having on anlytics is that when a user searches for something over a secure connection, the keyword(s) that the user searched for is removed from the referral string. Meaning that a referral is detected from a search engine, but as the keyword has been removed would be logged as Not Available (or equivalent for the relevant analytics package).

As mentioned previously, it is assumed that up to 70% of search terms will be affected by this by the end of September 2013. The huge recent increase of these secure searches has come from Internet Explorer who from IE7 onwards now only supports the secure verison of Google’s search results.

Suddenly trying to understand the impact of any SEO improvements you are making to your site will not be able to be tracked effectively using your standard analytics packages.

One potential way of getting insight for SEO purposes could be to create an Advanced Segment that sets the referrer type to Search Engines and where the keyword is unavailable. Once you apply this segment, you can then look at top landing pages and understand the performance of your top landing pages. You could start to trend this over time and validate any changes this way.

This issue affects all analytics packages, including Google Analytics.

Suddenly, SEO just got a lot harder for everyone. Ironic really as Google is trying to ensure that they eliminate what they term as ‘Search Spam’ from their search results pages – see this video from Matt Cutts – but they are not allowing website owners to see how these changes affect them and how to best optimise their sites through data.

It feels like they are giving with one hand and taking with the other.

SEO is more than just tags on a page

In short:

  • Have a strategy. Understand which keywords you want to target and why.
  • Benchmark yourself. Have a clear understanding of how you rank now on the keywords you are targeting yourself against.
  • Decide you how you want to roll out your changes – all at once or one at a time. Sometimes if you do it all at once you don’t necessarily know what worked/what didn’t.
  • Sit and wait. Sometimes it can take a couple of months to see improvements in rankings.
  • Make Google Webmaster Tools your friend and if you use Google Analytics, get the two linked together as this is quite a formidable pairing.

I wrote an email to an Accenture colleague with some thoughts on SEO. She had forwarded on an email from other Accenture colleagues that had loads of important information on the more technical side and how to implement good SEO. But there was nothing there about how to find the correct keywords to target, benchmarking where you are now and accurately measuring where you want to get to.

While this is in no way a solution to or finalised approach, it will hopefully give you enough of an idea of a good approach to setting an SEO strategy with some useful tools that you can use as well.

This was my email:

The main thing to remember with SEO is that its not just a technical solution – having the correct tags and well-structured html is only a part of it. You need well thought out copy and have many high quality sites linking to you with relevant keyword rich anchor text.

The first thing that I would do would be to come up with a strategy. What is it that we are trying to achieve? Which keywords do we want to improve on? What does success look like? Who of my competitors are doing well? Where are the gaps that I can take advantage of?

Some tools that I would recommend would be industry standard ones such as Hitwise, Google Trends and ComScore. Hitwise offers you the ability to look at which keywords drive traffic to yourself and to your competitors. It can also compare you against an industry, individual sites or a group of sites that you define yourself.  This helps you to identify where the opportunities might be that you can capitalise on.

Google Trends is a free tool that gives you an idea of how often nominated keywords are searched for in different territories. It doesn’t give you actual numbers but does give you an indication.

Then there’s the tech side of things. Reviewing your HTML, looking at microformats and other more granular html tags that Google and some other search engines still support. In addition, site speed is also quite often taken into account so using Firefox plugins like yslow and other online tools to help speed up the rendering of pages in a browser is also important. In addition to this looking at how your site is cached and trying our different pre-warming techniques can also help with this.

Another great tool in the SEO arsenal is landing pages. If you are trying to compete on specific keywords, create bespoke landing pages for these keywords with relevant keyword rich copy and with links through to relevant product – again with keyword rich anchor text.