Dealing with (not provided)

Postmortis

Postmortis

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Would love to pick your brains on how you guys are dealing with 'not provided', saving whatever precious keyword data there may be. Do you use any of the following:
- exclude Google traffic (although Yahoo has not provided as well)
- focus on Search Analytics data from Google's Search Console
- look at landing page visits and assign + estimate keyword visits for each

I've been going the 'exclude Google traffic' way:
1. gather all organic visits excluding Google
2. extract branded keyword visits and non-branded keyword visits
3. calculate the branded and non-branded percentage splits based on that
4. apply this percentage split to the remaining large amount of Google's encrypted 'not provided' visits to get estimated brand and non-brand traffic figures.

Thanks.
 
@Postmortis I can't believe I missed this...

It's unfortunate what's happened with the "not provided" data. There is no "real" way of getting the data base besides voodoo math and prediction algos. However all is not lost.

What I do when creating content is already have a list of keywords (creating the two list methods is from Day 6 - Keyword Research) which I am attempting to target and rank for. I always input the keywords into a rank tracker ahead of time so I can start monitoring my progress and the competition's progress as well.

Then once I post the article I simply monitoring the rankings of the terms I went after and any variation Google suggest came up with when doing manual searches or keyword research for.

What you have to consider is if you start ranking for "red shoes" on page 10 for example, you'll also start ranking for the long-tailed versions as well. So my main plan is a simple attack of pushing up the "red shoes" and not really worrying about every long-tail version I rank for unless they are significant.

Every month I take the pages I want to find my rankings for and throw them through SEMRush and SERPWoo's Keyword Finder, the exact URL, and pull the data from there. Those two give me a nice output of current rankings that are significant but most likely are showing up for in the "not provided" section. Any tool that can pull the keyword data of an exact URL should work for this. It's best to schedule a time and day to do all this once a month. If a tool has an API functionality you can automate this whole process as well.

It completely sucks we don't have the data, but at the same time I use this as an opportunity to focus on terms I decided to rank for myself so my campaign is a bit more focused.
 
You can see which search terms are sending you clicks through Webmaster Tools, and easily figure out which pages they are going to.
 
Worrying about (not provided) is a productivity killer, in most cases, in my opinion. I won't say "all", as there are few absolutes. The thing is, you don't necessarily need extremely granular data on every single keyword. Nowadays, if you rank for a short tail keyword, you're going to rank for any number of long tail variations. As a result, why worry about exact traffic from an exact keyword?

Instead, keep it simple. Use a good rank tracker and track your main keywords as well as some long tail variations. Also, setup an advanced segment, in Google Analytics, to track the pages you're optimizing for. Contrary to popular opinion, correlation can sometimes suggest causation. If you see rankings for a set of similar keywords improve, you see them hit the first page, and you see traffic to those associated pages improve.....well that kind of speaks for itself. That will give you more than enough feedback to keep you moving forward in the right direction.
 
You can always throw your URL(s) into Google Adwords and let it tell you what you should be paying for/ranking for......
 
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