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Did having the visibility of search keywords ever really help people "optimise" their page text for increased business? I am far from an expert in this, but wo

Did having the visibility of search keywords ever really help people "optimise" their page text for increased business? I am far from an expert in this, but wouldn't you only get to see the search queries of people who found the site already? How do you get from that to knowing what to change? :) I did always enjoy looking at the AWStats output for my old web pages to see what hilarious pornographic keywords people were using to accidentally find me.

dangrossman 13y ago
People who ran websites used to be able to link specific searches to specific sales or subscriptions. That means you can assign actual revenue numbers to different groups of search terms. Now, you have no way to make that link. You know which search terms bring traffic to the site, but not which among all those terms are linked to your revenue. With the first data set, you can see that people searching for "red widgets" buy your product, while people searching for "blue widgets" don't. You stop writing about blue widgets, make more content about red widgets, go out and blog about red widgets, run ads about red widgets, and both increase your traffic and your revenue. With the second data set, you see "red widgets" and "blue widgets" are bringing people to your site. Maybe "blue widgets" even brings much more traffic, and you assume that's where your sales are coming from. You could spend months optimizing content, building audience and running marketing campaigns about blue widgets before you realize they weren't your customers at all.
- anaphor 13y ago
  So you mean this will help get rid of those sites that create fake pages based on search results?
  - dangrossman 13y ago
    No, it won't have that affect at all. They weren't creating pages based on search traffic they were already receiving, but search traffic they could potentially receive. You can still use the Google Keyword Planner to get lists of millions of keywords and their search volume. Webspam isn't going to be reduced by this change.
- mfincham 13y ago
  If search engine queries being visible leads companies to write more promotional "blogs" and "content" that cruft up the web...
  - dangrossman 13y ago
    The kind of query visibility they need for that has not changed at all. Google still reports search volume for specific sites in Webmaster Tools, and for the search engine as a whole through the Keyword Planner tool. It's only the ability to link search terms to individual people that's been lost... unless you pay for it, as advertisers still get that data.
    - mfincham 13y ago
      Got you. Thanks for the thorough explanation, you've made an important distinction for me that the linked article did not.

dangrossman 13y ago

People who ran websites used to be able to link specific searches to specific sales or subscriptions. That means you can assign actual revenue numbers to different groups of search terms. Now, you have no way to make that link. You know which search terms bring traffic to the site, but not which among all those terms are linked to your revenue. With the first data set, you can see that people searching for "red widgets" buy your product, while people searching for "blue widgets" don't. You stop writing about blue widgets, make more content about red widgets, go out and blog about red widgets, run ads about red widgets, and both increase your traffic and your revenue. With the second data set, you see "red widgets" and "blue widgets" are bringing people to your site. Maybe "blue widgets" even brings much more traffic, and you assume that's where your sales are coming from. You could spend months optimizing content, building audience and running marketing campaigns about blue widgets before you realize they weren't your customers at all.

anaphor 13y ago
So you mean this will help get rid of those sites that create fake pages based on search results?
- dangrossman 13y ago
  No, it won't have that affect at all. They weren't creating pages based on search traffic they were already receiving, but search traffic they could potentially receive. You can still use the Google Keyword Planner to get lists of millions of keywords and their search volume. Webspam isn't going to be reduced by this change.
mfincham 13y ago
If search engine queries being visible leads companies to write more promotional "blogs" and "content" that cruft up the web...
- dangrossman 13y ago
  The kind of query visibility they need for that has not changed at all. Google still reports search volume for specific sites in Webmaster Tools, and for the search engine as a whole through the Keyword Planner tool. It's only the ability to link search terms to individual people that's been lost... unless you pay for it, as advertisers still get that data.
  - mfincham 13y ago
    Got you. Thanks for the thorough explanation, you've made an important distinction for me that the linked article did not.