Google continues its secure initiative.

A few months ago Google announced secure search for those in the USA. Today, the rollout continues around the Globe.

Google is trying to offer its user security as they browse the web and perform searches. For bloggers that track with analytics software (including Google Analytics), this means that some of the organic keyword data is blocked. The paid keyword data is revealed, but the organic keyword data is blocked.

It should also be noted that data is only blocked when Google users are logged in to their accounts while searching.

So with keyword data being blocked the question is…

How does this affect bloggers?

The answer – it doesn’t matter.

The Real Focus of Blog Analytics

It’s easy to get caught up in the keywords sending traffic to your blog. It’s fun to research keywords, write content for the targeted keyword and see users search for those keywords and find answers to their questions with your content.

It is very rewarding to go through this process and to have it happen multiple times.

The future of blogging, though, is about more than bringing in traffic. Blogging is about outcomes and the ultimate outcome of blogging, which is a marketing effort, is to drive profit.

So it makes sense to focus on profit as he end result of blogging strategy.

And you don’t really need Google Analytics or Google’s organic keyword data to understand what pages on your site are driving the most profit.

I concede that knowing keyword data is important for understanding what keywords drive discovery for a business. It’s important to know what is happening at the top of the sales funnel and blogging is very much about discovery.

However, I feel it’s better to focus on profit and you can get at this data without Google Analytics and organic keyword data.

Various analytics programs, including Google Analytics, allow you to track pathways within your site. These allow you to setup the pages your visitors visit and how they work their way through your site.

Something each business blog should have is a system for tracking the pathways that lead to conversion. You have to define the various conversions within your unique business.

For a consulting business, this would mean tracking the pages your blog visitors go to after reading individual posts. You want your visitors to go to pages like your Contact page and your email sign-up page. These pages move visitors down the sales funnel closer to contacting you and becoming a profitable customer.

Once you have an understanding of how your best customers travel through your site you can analyze the posts that originally brought them in. You can also ask your current customers the posts they found most interesting and useful on your site.

From here, you can gain an understanding of the kind of content that drives profit for your business.

At this point it would be nice to have keyword data, but I don’t see it as necessary. You can figure out the kind of post that does well for your blog and continue with the winning formula.

Google has its own initiatives and one of those is to make its users feel secure while searching.

This means things are changing for folks that use the search data.

For bloggers this is not the end of the world. It’s still possible to focus on profit and write the kind of posts that bring in paying customers.

Without keyword data, bloggers just need to focus on profit, not keywords.