In an ironic twist, Google, the company who shares information with the NSA, has decided not share information with brands about their websites. On September 23, 2013, Google confirmed to Search Engine Land :

 "We want to provide SSL protection to as many users as we can, in as many regions as we can — we added non-signed-in Chrome omnibox searches earlier this year, and more recently other users who aren’t signed in. We’re going to continue expanding our use of SSL in our services because we believe it’s a good thing for users….The motivation here is not to drive the ads side — it’s for our search user"

Where you previously were able to see which keyword searches were bringing traffic to your website on Google Analytics, what you will see now will be "not provided." Google will still provide the information to those that advertise with Google AdWords. The inbound marketing analytics provided by my HubSpot software in September show a marked decrease in identified keywords and it will drop off to zero in October. 

What's up with Google?

I'm a big user of Google products. I use Google Apps for Business (Gmail, calendar,etc.) for my business. I have a Samsung Galaxy S4 that runs on Google's Android operating system. I use Google's Chrome browser. One of the reasons I've come to use so many of Google's products is because of their interoperability with other systems and products.

I loved Google's Apps Sync for Outlook. With my Microsoft Outlook 2010 software, Apps Sync provided a seamless integration of my Google Apps for Business platform with my Microsoft Office software. When I upgraded to Office 2013, I found out that Google is no longer supporting Apps Sync for Outlook for click-to-run versions of Office 2013 (which most small businesses use.) Could their decision have anything to do with Microsoft's "Scroogled" ads?

In the Search Engine Land article cited above, the author states, "I suspect the increased encryption is related to Google’s NSA-pushback." Whether the decision was to increase ad sales or to deflect criticism about their cooperation with the NSA, small businesses and individuals are the ones that suffer most from their decision.

How should you adjust your inbound marketing efforts?

The short answer is you really shouldn't change your inbound marketing efforts, with the exception that you will need to use different, less precise means to analyze success. You can still use Google Adwords Keyword Planner and inbound marketing software like HubSpot to help you choose the keywords to use in your inbound marketing. You should still use your targeted keywords in your urls, page headers, web page content and blog articles.

Rather than seeing exactly what keyword searches are driving traffic to your site, you should now look at which website pages and blog articles are producing the most traffic. You can still see where you rank for keyword phrases and the amount of average monthly searches to evaluate your keyword strategy. At the highest level, you should evaluate the organic traffic coming to your site on a monthly basis to see if it's increasing, decreasing or staying the same. My advice is to choose keywords that your customers and buyers use to search for what you do and to use them naturally on your website and in your blog articles. If you do this and create good content targeted at your ideal customers, you'll drive the right traffic to your site.

Summary

Google's decision to stop providing information on keywords driving traffic to websites reduces your ability to precisely measure the sources of your organic website traffic. However, you should continue to use the fundamentals of your inbound marketing approach as you always have. Target keyword phrases your ideal customer's use to search for what you do and create good content using those keywords naturally targeted to them. What this will do is to change your approach from search engine optimization to customer experience optimization. After all, search engines don't buy from you, do they?

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