Another ‘bombshell’ was landed on the Search Engine Optimisers by Google last week, when they announced, for user privacy’s sake, they;

“will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site”

Oh fickle finger of fate. As soon as you get over your Panda eyes (the name of Google’s last bombshell), you suddenly can’t see anything anymore. Curse the luck of the SEO.

SEO is the house, Google is the sand

If you build a business based purely on SEO, the model is likely to come under pressure at some point. Google change their minds, they catch up with all the ‘tricks’ eventually, and this can have a big effect, instantly and dramatically.

How do you fancy building a business on something that might disappear in the snap of fingers?

And another thing. Where’s my soapbox….I’m not sure I understand why the world expects to continue to receive ‘free advertising’, or why they are so upset when it is affected by Google’s move to protect user privacy.

SEO people are very much up in arms, a link for their trouble. But as for telling Google you’ll have to go black hat to get around it. That’s not smart.

How will this affect our web marketing lives?

Only for those Logged in to google, right?

Ok, this does only apply to ‘Signed In’ visitors (Google Plus anyone?) but we are already seeing visits with search terms as ‘not provided’ – the numbers of people logged in will grow rapidly in our view. Google Plus will be a big part of search, you won’t want to miss it.

Sorry, it is really ‘going to be going away’

Bye Bye, it was nice knowing you

We will miss those search terms, they were insightful.

If you could discover the terms that were converting, then you could focus efforts. And, as only a small proportion of terms ever convert into enquiries, it was like finding nuggets of gold in the sifting pan, or striking oil even.

CPC is still information rich

But in the SEO’s mind, the biggest of ‘rat smells’ is that this doesn’t apply to Google’s advertising clicks. Google rightly argue that it will stop people spending money if you can’t tell what is working or not.

I can only say they haven’t met half the people using Adwords that I have.

Nevertheless, it looks like, for the moment we will still get search queries for visitors from paid, however hypocritical and however much SEO’s cry ‘foul!’.

Justifying the difference in stance, I keep thinking that being logged into Google must allow people to identify you personally somehow. It would explain the instant decision and not very well thought out response to the not very well thought out… outcry.

No change there then

We’ve always argued, (as most people who know us will verify).

Oh, we should have carried on with that sentence… we’ve always argued that we don’t start SEO until we understand the phrases that will convert. And the quickest, most reliable way to discover what works or not is to run very tightly focussed Adwords campaigns.

Depending on the volumes, this can be slow. But, actually, it is better than going fast and wasting loads of (clients) money on generating loads of traffic that does…nothing. We’ve asked them, they agree. Well, some do, occasionally.

So, we can still find the phrases that work in the same way we have always done. And we do understand from our Adwords data how many people are looking for things. Which is pretty much the only reliable way to focus the SEO activity.

You do know that we love SEO?

If we know what’s working, we want to make sure we optimise the site to focus on attracting attention from Google and visitors on that subject. This won’t change, data or no SEO data.

We will still be able to focus the content, we can still see that people are coming to the landing page, and we can tell the percentage that convert – just not the rate of conversion in precise terms from free visits any more. But the overall figure will be there to justify our existence.

And, we should also still be able to see ‘where we are in google’ for search phrases as a reference to how we’re doing.

If all Search Query Data went away?

We don’t want Search Data to go away, lets get that straight. But what would happen if it ALL disappeared.

My view is that people would have to put their faith more into good content, and they would still do the things they do today. It would just be like TV advertising all over again. You know half of it works, just not which half.

It would be more important to invite website visitors to identify themselves, at which point we may have permission to follow up and track their interest. That would encourage more content marketing which essentially trades valuable content for permission to stay in touch during the buying period. It’s called Marketing Automation.

Marketing Automation – the hidden grey line

This is where things have been getting tricky in the last few years. Systems have been starting to track people anonymously when they arrive on websites.

Systems like Marketo, Pardot and dozens of others have been starting to keep records of anaonymous visitors to be assigned to real people when they eventually identify themselves.

If you’re in marketing and you get excited by that sort of data, then you probably shouldn’t have it.

Along with re-marketing, which is essentially tagging people when they come to your website and then following them around with Ads (so….that’s why SEOMOZ advertise on some very strange sites), all of this behaviour freaks visitors out, or it would do, should they know about it.

And that’s where this ruling is coming from.

The impending doom

This just can’t happen, or I’m moving across the Atlantic. Don’t worry, I’ll visit, you’ll keep in touch, it’ll be great for holidays.

The information commissioner’s office to be found at – ico dot gov dot uk

I’m not linking to them, I don’t want them to know I exist. They’re pushing ahead with their public protection charter and threatening to implement policies that will make you seek permission to use any sort of anonymous analytics. Seemingly this has to be done before people get to the site – (well, that’s just as silly as what they’re suggesting).

It only applies to Europe, not the rest of the world. Europe can afford the loss of business, right?

Bottom Lines

You have to respect people’s privacy, it is a fundamental human right. There’s no doubt it is a good thing if the prospect of collusion and sharing data is about to undermine our travelling aorund the web unmolested.

And if Ryan air manage to increase their fares automatically the second time I visit their website, then so can other people.

But I don’t personally think there is anything wrong with tracking people anonymously. We don’t need signatures for people who happen to be caught on cctv.

Oh wait, We do.

The man who knows everything about CCTV rules says it’s covered by the Data Protection act, and you can actually demand to see what you were wearing in the tax office last week.

So we’ll have to wait and see. Apparently, the Euro Debt talks continue, and we may be out of Europe by the morning.

Well, you never know your luck.