With all the news regarding the disappearance of keywords from Google Analytics, there is a lot of commotion in the SEO world. At MINDSCAPE, we don’t think there is reason to be all that worried.

A few years ago, when Google began to make clear their intention to decrease the importance of keywords and raise the importance of content, we were confident that our time-tested approach to web development and digital marketing was right on target.

For our partners, we have always focused on keyword research (for volume and relevance), and on building a site map that assigns one primary keyword “theme” per page. For those with whom we partner, this means two things:

  1. Each page is optimized for a keyword based theme
  2. The landing page entrances in Google Analytics tell us what keyword theme is gaining traffic

So we may not be able to tell that the keyword “womens leather jackets” is converting X visitors BUT we will be able to tell that people searching for leather jackets pertaining to women are converting X percent based on the entrance numbers for the “womens leather jacket” landing page. Rather than focusing on keywords, we just shift our focus to landing pages.

All the commotion about 100% “not provided” is, in our opinion, a bit over-rated for those who have been focused on creating great user experiences with focused content on each page of a well-optimized site. The Google algorithm change happened about month ago and we saw the flickers in position for a few days. After that time, we saw most positions come back to normal while a few odd things did not bounce back completely.

For us, those odd things pertained to local-related searches. We have a good deal of information on local searches and have been testing a few theories and monitoring its impact. All these changes make a lot of sense when we understand that Google is trying to shift to an entity-based search instead of a keyword-based search. So what is our plan moving forward for our Digital Marketing Partners?

We intend to keep researching keywords and their search volumes. And we intend to keep mapping our keywords to pages of a well-optimized site. We will continue to embrace the mindset that themed content provides the best user experience and the best search value. If you follow this same approach, you – like our partners – should continue to realize great success throughout 2014 and beyond!

What are your thoughts?