Goodbye Keyword Data, Hello Secure Search

At the end of last week, Google announced a major update that has changed the face of search engine marketing for good.

As part of an ongoing move to create a more secure web experience, the search giant has just made all search enquiries encrypted using HTTPS. In non-technical terms, that means Google has stopped passing on keyword data to site owners, which means the ability to track what your guests were looking for when they landed on your resort’s website is gone.    

Although the update won’t affect other search engines like Yahoo and Bing, Google has always dominated at least two thirds of the search market, so this will have a huge impact on the amount of keyword data you can collect.

The change comes almost two years after Google began rolling out encrypted search to protect the privacy of users signed into its services. Since then anyone looking for search query data in Google Analytics will have started seeing the message‘(Not Provided)’ with increasing regularity, in fact; the percentage of data lost for some industries was as high as 50%, according to a recent BrightEdge report.

Now that all users’ searches are being encrypted - even when you’re not logged into Google services, or use private browsing or ‘incognito’ mode, it seems that keyword data (from Google at least) is set to disappear completely.

What’s your reaction to Google’s big step towards completely secure search? Let us know in the comments.

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