After two protracted debates on Twitter about keyword referrals and SERP tracking I want to make some more cohesive statements than is possible on Twitter.

Keyword Referrals

Today Google announced that the default login behavior for users will be secure and encrypted. They also announced that query data for logged in users will no longer be passed to Google Analytics unless the user clicks a paid link. I think that default to secure is fine and good, but not passing the query data unless you are paying is shady. Knowing what people are searching for is very helpful for businesses in choosing what they change about their site. Not just for optimizing for traffic, but also optimizing for online experience and usability of the site in general. The people that are most likely to be hurt by this are the small and medium sized business that are dependent on Google products, and industries that are heavily skewed toward users of Google products. As an example:

• People who use Gchat
• People who keep Gmail open
• People that use Google Analytics
• People that us Adwords
• People that use Google+
• People that connect to Google Labs Products
• People that comment on Blogger
• People that comment on YouTube

Many of the changes that Google has made over the last few years have been working toward making ”Google” a more embedded experience on the web and more individualized. The trend is toward more people being logged in, which means we will see a continuing degradation of data. This is particularly worrisome for countries where Google has over a 90% share and for business that have fewer than 100 search visits in a day. For small businesses making smart data-driven decisions was already hard, now it will be harder.

Search Engine Rank Page (SERP) Results

Search is becoming an amorphous term. Some people argue that Facebook and Twitter are search portals. Even if we restrict the conversation to just Google there are multiple separate, but interconnected, search channels: Web, Mobile, Local, News, Blogs, Image, etc. Many people are very focused on tracking rank. The problem with tracking rank is that it is not entirely connected to traffic. There are vast difference in traffic between phrases in the same conceptual space and a very different position in the buying cycle between search channels. For some people traffic is the only thing being monetized, so all visits are equal, but most people have a conversion to consider. In many competitive cases you are also triggering universal search that pulls in multiple search channels, which means #1 Organic result can be visually the 11th result.

(Click to see full size)

No Organic results show up above the fold for that search: Locksmith. Who is getting those clicks? Rank is NOT a performance indicator. Traffic is a performance indicator, money is a performance indicator, phone calls are a performance indicator. Rank is an interesting bauble that has interesting information at the beginning of a campaign to see your competition and a very steep curve once you are in the top ten. There is often much more to gain from focusing on getting traffic from phrases that aren’t getting traffic yet, particularly because of partial match links. Applying strategies that value diversity and monetization of traffic over SERP rank will win in the long term.