You may come across the term “not provided” while working on Google Analytics or similar web analytics tools. Generally, the analytics reports such tools provide a list of top keywords driving a site’s traffic. Such reports often feature the term “Not provided” when the keywords typed by the users to find a website are not available.
Before exploring how the “not provided” option impacts website SEO, let’s understand what the term stands for.
“Not provided” searches are conducted by users who perform the search on a secure server. You can identify secure servers by the “s” at the end of the “http” on their URL. As a web privacy and security measure, these searches do not show up in the analytics.
Let’s say, for example, you run an e-commerce website where you sell fashion accessories for women. If someone uses a secure search to look for “women’s fashion accessories” and comes to your website, the keyword referral data would be “women’s fashion accessories.” Since Google needs to protect the privacy of the user, the particular search data will be barred from Google Analytics.
In 2011, Google introduced Secure Search, which restricted web analytics tools like Google Analytics from displaying the keywords a user searched to land on a website. One of the major impacts of the changes made by Google in 2011 was the encryption by default of data like keyword use. Since then, data encryption has started taking place under certain circumstances.
Since 2011, “not provided” has started appearing in the analytics reports when users do a keyword search while logging into their Google account. You also see this term on the report instead of an actual keyword when the user performs a secure search using an SSL protocol. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) was created to offer users a more secure browsing experience.
Although Google uses secure search protocols to improve user privacy, keywords still appear in paid searches. In other words, you can still access the “not provided” organic keywords data using tools like Google AdWords.
When Google first implemented the changes that led to the appearance of “not provided,” Google claimed that it would only affect a small percentage (around 10%) of keyword data. However, some website owners report that up to 90% of their keyword data appears as “not provided.” This has a significant impact on SEO.
Earlier, website owners used keyword search data to optimize their digital marketing campaigns. However, with the growing appearance of “not provided” in the analytics reposts, it becomes hard to implement targeted SEO for marketers. In fact, the appearance of “not provided” interferes with any strategy that requires individual keyword optimization.
Google Search Console is a good alternative where you can find a variety of data about a website for the last 30 days. SEOs can use this information against the data of the previous 30-day period and export it to a CSV file.
Moreover, Google passes referred data to customers, allowing the website owners to use PPC data to optimize keywords for their Google Ads campaigns. You need to link your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account to get the data.
“Not Provided” can jeopardize several strategies by restricting your access to keyword-related data. If you are willing to pay, you can use several alternative methods to get the insights and optimize your strategies based on the data.