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As my first post for the OCV blog, I was planning on writing a generic – but appropriately inspiring and moving, of course – post on why SEO is awesome, including tips on how to explain search engine optimization to your grandmother. Trust me, you would have loved it.

But on Tuesday, this happened: Google announced they were making SSL search the default for all signed-in Google users, and as a result, Analytics would no longer show referring data for these users.

Cue the uproar!

No keyword data for an entire set of visitors? Now, instead of seeing what keyword sends a person to one of our sites, we see this:

Why This is Bad for SEO:

Not having keyword data makes it harder for us to identify what our customers are searching for, which makes it harder to create awesome content or optimize the content we have. We can get keyword data elsewhere, but it’s less trustworthy and really, less relevant.  Bottom line? It’s now more difficult to improve your site’s presence in search engines.

But that’s not really what’s making SEOs so angry. True, changing to SSL search only affects visits from people signed in to Google accounts, and, true, providing a more secure search should be a good thing. But what has people like Gianluca Fiorelli calling this a ”keyword apocalypse” is that Google’s move suggests a serious preference for their own ad networks, one that could significantly change the rules for SEO.

Say someone goes from their Gmail account to Google.com and searches for “cross-eyed opossum.” They are still logged in to Google, so if they click on an organic result in the SERPs, the data for that query will not be available. However, if they click on an ad on the same page, that data does get collected in PPC data. If a logged-in user’s keyword data cannot be available for organic search, why is it still available for paid search? Does privacy not matter when money is involved?

The limit on organic keyword data may be an indicator of things to come – less data for organic search, period. Besides the obvious problem that the change skews organic data and ignores an entire subset of our audience (and let’s face it – Gmail users are different than Yahoo, Hotmail, and whatever else is out there), it also indicates a disregard for organic search. For SEOs who live and die by Google, that’s a problem.

That being said…

Why Part of Me Doesn’t Care:

1. SEO is not going away. As long as Google is a search engine, they’ll need to produce organic results relevant to a query, not just results people pay for.
2. If this is really about money and not about privacy, then we’ll eventually be able to pay for organic keyword data. Of course, free is always better, but having to pay is better than no data at all.
3. If it really is about privacy, then we just need to adjust. We can do that by finding other data sources and shifting our thinking. See #6.
4. Google is not the only search engine. This might encourage us to diversify – the more referring sources, the stronger our organic traffic will be.
5. This forces more collaboration with PPC, which is a good thing for our team.
6. Who’s to say we shouldn’t be focusing less on specific keywords and more on search impressions and organic traffic? An emphasis on creating quality pages that fit a keyword “bucket” might be more beneficial than nitpicking for specific keywords. Look at recent tests on partial match and all the changes with personalized search – developments in SEO seems to be emphasizing relevancy, context, and quality. We can accomplish that without specific keyword data.
7. SSL search doesn’t really change the way our team does SEO. We’re still focused on creating long-lasting, link-worthy content that’s relevant and useful to our visitors. We’ll still spend time building quality relationships with other sites, bloggers, influencers, and our customers, and we’ll still optimize our pages the best we can so our content is visible in search engines. Does the limit on keyword data make that harder? Yes, but maybe it will make us do our jobs better by making us pay more attention to other sources of data.

I could spend some significant time feeling angry at Google (and what SEO isn’t just a little bit angry at Google most of the time?) But I’m used to Google throwing punches my way. It makes things interesting. So bring it, G.