The concern – that it is no longer possible to tie the keywords used in Google searches back to conversions unless one is a Google Adwords customer – is a big one. Optimizing around keywords is a foundational cornerstone of SEO. Now that organic keyword data is no longer available, marketers, agencies, and webmasters must triangulate disparate data sets, including landing page traffic stats, ranking stats, conversion data, and sample keyword data derived from Webmaster Tools, to hypothetically construct a model of keyword usage, a chore that makes life far more difficult for those working in SEO. The change also makes it more difficult to justify the actual work that SEOs do, a huge concern for those in the profession who for years have fought skepticism within their organizations about the efficacy – and budget-worthiness – of SEO.
An Existential Threat?
Does Encrypted Search pose an “existential threat” to the SEO profession? Not according to Bruce Clay, who addressed the issue several times in his talks. “The only people who should be worried are the ones who don’t know how to do SEO right,” said Clay. According to Clay, “doing it right” means focusing not on keywords, but on users, an approach he calls “community persona-centric SEO.” While Clay empathizes with the plight of what he calls “immature SEOs,” he clearly doesn’t have much sympathy for those who’ve used keyword optimization to “spin, spam, and stuff,” and believes that Encrypted Search will ultimately result in less clutter, junk, and irrelevancy in the search ecosystem.
Many SMX Attendees Caught Unaware
Several vendors made a special point of adding “Not Provided” messaging to their marketing materials, and at least one lecture – “100 Percent Not Provided,” by SeoClarity’s Mutal Gandhi, addressed marketers’ specific concerns about the issue. Gandhi’s talk – which was added at the last minute to the SMX program – was mobbed by attendees. Gandhi himself was surprised by how many people turned out for his talk, but he was also shocked that so few SMX attendees even knew about the “Not Provided” issue. “Only about 20 percent of the audience were aware of what had happened,” said Gandhi.
An Opportunity For Bing?
I met up with Jason Dailey, Senior Director, Search Evangelist, Bing, after his presentation, to ask him whether Bing was planning to emulate Google’s plunge into Encrypted Search. Daily told me that Bing would continue to make organic query data available, which is good news for SEOs who still need keyword information. Earlier, a similar statement had been made to me by a rep at the Bing booth. There is clearly a marketing opportunity for Bing to position itself as bastion of transparency, but it is less certain whether it plans to add this issue to the litany of complaints against Google already evident in its “Scroogled” campaign.
Search In the Time of “Not Provided”
While many at SMX agreed that doing SEO in the age of “Not Provided” will require a new way of thinking about the discipline, it’s not clear how the day to day work of an SEO will be affected. Much of the work that people in SEM do is concerned with reporting, and there is no doubt that reporting will change, and these reports may be far less clear to the C-suite. Determining the business performance of content will be a far more complicated affair, involving more data sources, less precision, and more intuition. Keywords will still remain important, because this is still the way that most people search for web pages. But shifting SEO from its historic focus on keywords to something new and more nebulous will be difficult, and perhaps wrenching, to those who are unable to make the transition.
I have no doubt that this is not the last we’ll be hearing about the “Not Provided” issue.
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