When I first found out about Google Analytics I thought it was the bee’s knees; does anyone say that anymore? It was a great tool to see all sorts of information, but from the standpoint of doing SEO you could do in and see the types of keywords people were finding your site for and change things so that you could rank better online.
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That’s why it was so disappointing reading an article on Website Magazine showing that organic keyword search terms that used to be fed to us through Google Analytics is no longer. Indeed, when I went to Site Search and clicked on “search terms” the menu comes up but there’s absolutely no information in there; sigh…
Truthfully, things had been moving in this direction for a while, since late 2011. There was a category called “not provided” that started out slowly, and soon you noticed that more than 50% of your keyword data was being suppressed. I used to rely a lot on that, but I’d stopped using it and instead started using a tool that Firefox has (I’m not sure about other browsers), which I can’t tell you what it is right now because I only use it on my main computer and I’m presently on the road, but does an interesting job of telling you what your potential keywords are doing for you on Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Does this mean that Google Analytics is now useless? That would be a strong statement to make. For instance, one thing it still does is track your real traffic stats from visitors instead of all those bots and other things that could as traffic in other places. You can still see how well individual posts are working for you. You can still see the breakdowns for your visitors like new vs. old and how long people stay on your site, as well as a host of other things.
But keywords… nope, nada, not happening. What will you do instead? Most probably you’ll go back to the days where you create your list of keywords from your site, pop them into Google, and hope that you show up somewhere within the first 100 listings (I look at 50 at a time instead of the normal 10) and tweak from there. Or you can place more emphasis on trying to get your overall site to rank higher by using apps like Search Status, which works on Firefox and can tell you how you rank in multiple algorithm sites.
Keywords are still important, but Google’s not giving that information up. So work on your site’s content and it’s look, still add your keywords, and figure out how to use social media to help you along. I’m still trying to figure out how to outrank that other Mitch Mitchell, and keyword research isn’t going to help me on that. 
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