For nearly 3 years, web analytics tool Google Analytics has not shown the requests (keywords) typed by internet users into search engines that led them to your websites. This is extremely restrictive, mainly because this lack of visibility does not help website owners with their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as it doesn’t tell them which keywords they are being ranked on, nor those searched by the target audience.
Discover how Myposeo and its tools can help you discover this ‘Not Provided’ information to find keywords that will generate traffic.
We will illustrate this with an example: When a web user uses a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo) to search for something (e.g: buy a car), it is not always possible to track the exact words that he typed in to the search bar that led him to your website. We say it’s “not always possible” because there are alternative tools other than Google do exist that give you an overview of such requests.
Within Google Analytics you can figure out which keywords attracted significant traffic as they do provide you with a short list, however, the rest is shown as “not-provided”.
When a web user uses a search engine to search for something, it is not always possible to track the exact words that he typed in to the search bar that led him to your website.
Google defended their decision to do this citing security reasons, but it could also be because SEO is not a priority for Google, as they would much rather sell its Adwords keywords to advertisers. The ranking of results is organically generated by Google’s algorithm and will not be changed or influenced by SEO tricks
SEO can be a very important tool in generating traffic. It is important to know the number of visitors a website receives and to be able to determine where they came from and how they found the website. This is why it is much more complicated to improve the performance of such a tool without adequate visibility.
Google Analytics displays the origin of visits, but with regards to SEO, keywords being hidden acts as a barrier to optimising a site with specific expressions and keywords. For example, if the expression “buy handmade Persian carpet” generates 10 sales per month, you would never know because Google does not show it. This would be a missed opportunity for your business and could have a real impact on your turnover.
It is also more complicated to focus your content strategy for SEO if you have no idea which keywords generate the most traffic to your website.
Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tool) is a free tool available by Google that allows a Traffic Acquisition or Technical Manager to get additional Indexing and Search Traffic data from Google Analytics. To make the most out of this tool, it should be well configured and you should extract data regularly.
Google Search Console will provide you with a list of keywords (requests) that generated impressions on your website (display your results in Google for a research) and clicks by users. The Click Through Rate (CTR) lets you know the share of clicks your ad received on the results page and the average position of your website when a user searches for something.
The main drawback of Search Console, despite the tool being continuously improved, is that you can only access the history up to 3 months earlier and the number of keywords shown is limited. You don’t know if your website continues to perform on the request and you aren’t able to see the change in your average position or your click rate performance. That’s why a rank tracking tool is more useful in allowing you to move forward.
Myposeo’s SEM Analysis tool, provides you with a detailed list of keywords that with which users found, or will find your website on search engines. The Myposeo database offers 15 million keywords ranked by search volume. We receive all the results from the front page of search engines at least once a month for these keywords.
If you register your website and visit the “ranked keywords” tab, you will find all the keywords known to Myposeo. This will help you display your ads on the front page of Google. You will also be able to find an estimation of monthly traffic these keywords could generate for you.
This tool gives you a glimpse of the searches that show your website on search engines and also provides information about the traffic they generate. To filter through this overview, you need to follow these steps.
Please note: The SEM analysis has over 30 millions websites in the French market, you can also perform this analysis for competitor sites.
The SEM Analysis tool is very interesting because it lets you know which of your pages has the most ranked keywords and the traffic brought in by them.
This pre-analysis results can then be compared with your actual Google Analytics results to check potential traffic. For this to work, it will be necessary for you to verify the organic traffic generated by your pages.
All keywords triggering the page can then be filtered by a simple click.
To further crack the “not-provided” section of Google Analytics, Myposeo offers an SEO Rank Tracking tool. By creating a monitoring project and indicating the keywords you follow, you have the opportunity to find out the change in your rankings on search engines, on demand.
Based on what you can find with SEM analysis tool, you will be able to understand and follow the change in the SEO performance of your website. More specifically, the Rank Tracking tool allows to access much of the ‘Not-Provided’ information by estimating the traffic and attributing this traffic to your ranked keywords.
In the “Pages” tab, you have access to the daily share of traffic generated by your keywords for each ranked pages :
Here is the estimated traffic for the current day or the specific date range selected on the calendar. Each keywords gets an estimation of the percentage share of traffic.
A problem many companies face is that searches containing their brand name name are often those that generate high traffic. Myposeo allows you to classify your keywords in groups according to subjects or topics, to obtain separate statistics between your brand and non-brand keywords. The groups make it more likely to refine the data you collect (generic, fold, etc.). You then receive a distribution of the traffic between your keywords.
As the name suggests, traffic estimation is an indicator that allows you to calculate the potential volume of visits generated by the keywords based on their rankings. To calculate this, Myposeo uses the following information:
The Myposeo tool also makes it possible to customise the click through rates (CTR) to differentiate brand keywords from non-brand keywords (agency option and key account advertisers). This is to refine the decoding of the ‘Not-Provided’ section.
For more information read our detailed article on calculating traffic.
Even if tools like Google Search Console and Myposeo let you understand the ‘Not-Provided’ information, it is still not possible know and monitor a 100% of the traffic-generating keywords. The point is to identify and monitor the most relevant and high-performing ones.
The traffic estimation data are estimates and trends. The keywords will never all be clear (all versions) and click through rates can vary under different configurations (type of research, composition of results etc.).
Brand / non-brand assignment and topic-wise classification of your queries are essential for precise work, especially when you are working with several thousand keywords.
Once you start implementing a search engine optimisation strategy, it is essential to work with tools that allow you to bring additional information to those provided for free from Google’s tool . To improve your SEO, you need an overview of your rankings, traffic and your website performances.
Remember to implement essential tools needed to launch your campaign and set up alerts on your traffic-generating keywords.If you haven’t done so already, check out Myposeo’s tools and test them for free!
In this case, we will be highlighting the synergy between SEO and SEA (PPC) in search results pages. We will see, step by step, how Myposeo Insights can increase your performance and maximise your ROI by combining data collected using the two methods.
When we talk about the issue of localised tracking, what exactly are we referring to? We want to know the ranking of our physical points of sale in search engines for a given location (a particular city) and terminal, SERP results being personalised based on those two factors
Discover how Myposeo’s Rank Tracking tools can help ensure your online visibility and SEO performance is not compromised and your ranking has not fallen during website migration or redesign.
