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.
