HubSpot’s organic analytics and their relationship to conversions and customer acquisition are great. In fact, they’re the best I’ve ever used to date, but those analytics don’t tell the whole story anymore—especially with Google’s SSL hidden keyword rollout last October. It takes hours of spreadsheet set up and monthly updates to retrieve the organic search metrics that are most important in our new SEO reality. Google Analytics is no different. Since we can’t see some or most of our keywords, we need to be able to quickly compare and contrast that data with the words we can see.
Number of Keyword Phrases Driving Traffic
Many content marketers are coming to the realization that where a website ranks no longer matters. How many keyword phrases that drive traffic does. Having the ability to easily and robustly track the number of keyword phrases driving traffic over time is paramount. Comparing and contrasting the trend over the course of months or years provides the best content marketing success metrics with respect to organic search.
Branded/Non-branded Keyword Metrics
How convenient would it be for marketers to type in their company name with variations and the name of their branded products or services into an analytics package and have reports with and without all of their branded terms? Now, what if that data set also included the number of keywords, conversions, customers acquired and associated ratios while plotting them over time on a nice graph?
Spikes and contractions of the trend in branded phrases are very relevant to multiple aspects of PR, outbound and inbound marketing campaigns. Kuno has found conversion rates for non-branded phrases stay relatively consistent at one percent, but conversion rates for branded terms hover between three and three and a half percent.
Unknown Keyword/Not Provided Metrics
As many marketers are aware, Google rolled out a security update to its search results last year that caused searches performed by people logged into its search engine to be unreported. While the visit itself is tallied, the keyword is a mystery. The number of unknown keyword phrases driving traffic, conversions and customers is important to track, too.
Spikes and contractions in these metrics should be accounted for when making marketing decisions pertaining to known keywords, visits, conversions and customers. The number of known keyword phrases driving traffic dropping 10% in a month could be offset if the number of unknown phrases increases by 35% in the same month. So rather than seeing red ink a marketer would see black.
Conclusions
Analytics are like pixels; the more you have the clearer and sharper the whole image is. However, if the picture is missing just the right pixels the whole meaning of it can be distorted.
No longer can unknown keyword phrases, their relationship to known keyword phrases, and branded keyword phrases be ignored. They must be acknowledged in a much more robust, graphical and easy-to-access fashion in order to make the best inbound marketing decisions. Let’s hope the developers and programmers that build analytics systems agree. If so, we’ll be seeing these changes soon. In the meantime, watch this video to learn how Kuno increased organic search leads 633%.
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Inbound Marketing IS the New SEO
Learn how Kuno Creative increased leads from organic search by 633%. This video contains seven actionable SEO takeaways you can use today.
I very much agree to this article regarding the keyword traffic because there are times wherein the keywords articles just doesn’t fit the keywords that i type whenever i search for it. It just doesn’t seem right since i am expecting that it will be much easier to use the internet when looking for related articles. Sometimes it is a bit time consuming also especially when the articles are very unrelated to the keywords that i typed.
It is good to know that the problem regarding the unknown keywords and traffics are pointed out in this article. It really is a problem for a lot of internet users especially those who use search engines for important matters since it takes up a lot of time to look for that very much related article or answer that they are looking for. Hopefully this problem will be fixed soon since it is already identified.
the title answers itself. You cant measure something, or build something that measures something when it changes so quickly…
This is quite an interesting question, though we never really thought about it. If the entire concept of SEO has changed, then why are we still staying within our limitations of using the same tools to measure our progress on this frontier? We try to do something a tad different and then we fear that it might not give us the accurate information. Thus, we slip back to the old methods and prefer staying in the comfort zone. However, if we change our approach towards SEO/ SEM, then I believe we can get better results and even measure our efforts effectively with the same tools.
It wouldn’t be so bad, but those unknown’s always (for me at least) hold the number one spot so the amount of missing data jumps out at you whenever you login into Analytics.
PS. I wonder what the last sentence “watch this video to learn how Kuno increased organic search leads 633%.” converts at? LOL
I know I had to see the video, and at an hour long well worth the info it asks for!
Great job! :)
Warren:
I definitely know what you mean about the “unknown keywords.” That’s one of the main reasons I advocate for not tracking rank, but rather the total number of keywords driving traffic (known and unknown).
Glad you liked the SEO video – BTW it converts at 22%, well above our average for a video, but far below the 40 – 60% our downloads get.
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