Unlocking Not-Provided Organic Keywords?

[jebernier]

Received this email from <well known SEO tool provider> stating that they can unlock not-provided organic keywords that bring traffic to my websites. They are obviously not decrypting SSL so I'm not sure how accurate this claim is?

Anyone have any thoughts?

Here is the article: <snip>

Regards,

John

[edited by: aakk9999 at 2:17 pm (utc) on Jan 7, 2016]
[edit reason] Removed company name to avoid unfair promo [/edit]

[aakk9999]

I have removed SEO Tools Provider name as otherwise this post would look too much as an advertisment for the service this SEO Tools Provider is offering.

You are wondering how "unlocking Not Provided" is done and the answer is in that article whose URL we had to remove (paraphrased):

You would need to connect your Google Analytics and Search Console accounts of that website with their tool. They would then do some educated guessing based on statistical information on what the "Not Provided" keywords are and how much traffic each drives by combining the Not Provided information from GA with keywords reported in GSC (WMT).

What they are doing is most likely automating the process described in Search Engine Land article published last year:

How To Replace Google’s (Not Provided) Data To Strike SEO Gold
http://searchengineland.com/replacing-googles-not-provided-seo-gold-220045 [searchengineland.com]

You can also check Robert Charlton's post half way down this thread [webmasterworld.com...] (from September 2015) where Robert discusses unlocking Not Provided keywords.

[jebernier]

Thank you, very helpful.

I suspected it was just an educated guess.

Regards,

John

[Nutterum]

I am going to make another educated guess about which tool you were referring and tell you that if you have more than 100-200 landing/product pages their automation begins to fall apart. Tried it with a website consisting of ~5000 product pages and this tool was spewing such non-sense that I completely disregarded it.

Just my 2c on the matter.

[Robert Charlton]

aakk9999, thanks for finding that article again. I'd been looking for where I'd referenced it.

if you have more than 100-200 landing/product pages their automation begins to fall apart

Nutterum, your observation about the tool helps a lot. I'm sure you'd be right for most cases, as the process as described in the SEL article would be very hard to automate. I get a strong impression from the article that the process is as much an art as a science, and depends a lot on the specifics of the site being analyzed and on the problem being solved.

In the case of the site used in the article, an important clue for the writer was the naming convention of the page urls... which was keyword-oriented in a way that allowed some correlation between the targeted pages and the keyword traffic. Hard to say how often this is going to happen or how likely this might hold up over a lot of pages (and, more precisely I think, over a lot of keywords).

The analysis in that article, btw, was for spotting pages that were not performing... not for correlating all WMT/GSC and Google Analytics data.

I've speculated elsewhere that, since Screaming Frog can now connect to the Google Search Analytics API and pull in various data, it might be useful in connecting Analytics with other data... but I've not been able to look into that further. It would be very helpful to know what might be done.