Search engine marketing isn't easy. There's hours of keyword research, funnel planning, never-ending optimization and dead-ends everywhere.
But once you have your goal tracking in place on Google Analytics and the traffic on your website starts to come in you look to see which keywords are bringing in the bacon and...Whammy!..another dead end.
This dead end is called 'Unknown Keyword SSL' and will be seen whenever a user has used Google Chrome, or a Google app, to do their search.
It puzzles me that the world's best provider of web analytics data is the biggest culprit of blocking said data from analysts, but who am I to judge.
The 'Secure Sockets Layer' update (yeah, I'm going to stick to SSL if that's OK) was released several years ago by Google and was a generally great way for users to keep their search patterns a secret. Sadly it was a bit of a blow to search specialists looking to find keyword patterns they should focus on for future marketing and blogging.
After all, if you can't see which keywords are already working, how can you do better in the future?
Luckily there is a way around it, and it doesn't involve starting an online petition to ask everyone to stop using Google Chrome.
All you need are Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and a process that I found from the excellent inbound marketing agency Weidart.
Basically, syncronise your Google Analytics with your Webmaster Tools (if you haven't already, and you probably should have).
Then, in Webmaster Tools, go to 'Traffic' then 'Search Queries'. Be warned that you can only see results for the past 30 days, so maybe pop a reminder in your calender to check this once a month at least.
There you have it. It's easy when you know how...or when you find the right site on Google.
Thanks again to Frank Isca at Weidart for providing the answers to this process. Weidart are a US based inbound marketing agency specialising in HubSpot. For an inbound marketing agency that looks after Australia and New Zealand contact us!
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