9/23/2013 was a sad day for online marketers. Google announced a 100% secure search for its users who search using the Google search engine. What this means is there is no keyword data from this day forward that is being shared freely. The only way to get this data is to run Google Pay Per Click ad campaigns.
You may ask what does this this mean for your clients? Marketing just became more expensive. If you are performing SEO services for your client then you may want to suggest they run a paid ad campaign as well so you have all the data available to you to do the best job marketing for them.
You may be new to online marketing and may not be familiar why this is a big deal for us online marketers. Back several years ago Google used to provide the exact keywords to online marketers through Google Analytics which allowed us to fully see how they found out website. We were able to see how many times we showed up in search, down to the click-through rate. Then a couple years ago Google started placing these keywords into a “not provided” category where it should you the number of visits but no other data. So you used to see 50% of your data in this not provided category and it was hard to tell what to improve on within your marketing efforts. Well now it is a 100% reality of not seeing this keyword data unless you run the Google Paid ads.
Here are a couple of articles from reference to this decision. When days like this become reality I am sure some of us had Big Bertha available to knock Google upside the head.
http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searches-172487
BJ Internet Marketing 