An­other Blow For SEOs

Break­ing SEO news. If you’ve fol­lowed my blog, you know I’m on a mis­sion to con­vince you NOT to build your busi­ness on traf­fic from Google search.

Here’s to­day’s SEO news, con­firm­ing just that.

One of the most im­por­tant things you need to know to op­ti­mize your web site ef­fi­ciently is:

From which search terms do you ac­tu­ally get traf­fic to your site?

At first this in­for­ma­tion was read­ily avail­able through Google An­a­lyt­ics. You could ex­actly see what peo­ple were search­ing for when Google sent them to your web site.

2 years ago Google started to hide some of the in­for­ma­tion for a small per­cent­age of search queries. Within 2 years this has gone up to 40%.

Mean­ing, af­ter 2 years:

• For 40% of your search traf­fic you could not find out the search terms they used.
• For 60% you still could find out the search terms and op­ti­mize further.

Within the last 6 weeks the hid­den search traf­fic has gone from 40% to 74%.

It is ex­pected to go up to 100% within days or weeks.

Con­clu­sion: Via Google An­a­lyt­ics you can no longer find out which search terms peo­ple used to find your site!

I’m not blam­ing Google. Google, like every­one else, must change, must evolve. The re­sult, how­ever, is not good for small busi­ness re­ly­ing on search. Or, for the SEO industry.

To­day’s news is just an­other piece of the puzzle.

The big pic­ture is: Google is chang­ing, and within a few years it will send dra­mat­i­cally less traf­fic to busi­ness web sites.

Up­date 1: Brian Pasch’s video re­sponse to this post.

Brian Pasch has writ­ten an ex­cel­lent re­sponse to this blog post, ti­tled „The Death Of Vis­i­ble Key­word Re­fer­ral Traf­fic Is A Pre­ma­ture Claim” [up­date 2020: the post has been re­moved], and also cre­ated a de­tailled video. While he’s talk­ing speci­fi­clly about au­to­mo­tive deal­er­ship web­sites, the ar­ti­cle and video are just as rel­e­vant for any other industry.

I’ve in­cluded the video below.

1. Brian shows real life sta­tis­tics from ac­tual busi­ness web sites.
2. He’s show­ing how to ac­cess the key­word in­for­ma­tion in Google Analytics.
3. And he shows you 4 strate­gies how to get key­word in­sights be­sides those cov­ered in this blog post.

Up­date 2: My own web site analytics.

This post was orig­i­nally pub­lished Sept, 23, 2013. I’m adding my lat­est sta­tis­tics to­day, Oc­to­ber 8.

Af­ter Google Hum­ming­bird I’m see­ing a slight in­crease in traf­fic across al­most all of my sites. Not sure if Hum­ming­bird is the rea­son, might as well be sea­sonal effects.

I went to my an­a­lyt­ics and checked for the cur­rent state of ‘key­word not provided.’

As of to­day I have sev­eral sites in the 70’ies, one site above 80%. Clearly, the days of get­ting this valu­able key­word in­for­ma­tion from Google are gone.

But again, this is not im­por­tant in it­self, it’s im­por­tant as an in­di­ca­tor of the over­all trend: SEO, as we knew it, is dead.