At InnoCraft, we know that SEO is an important topic for most of you. If you have not heard of this term before, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It consists in having your content website visible within the search result pages without paying for ads. SEO is also often referred as « natural » or « organic » traffic.
In SEO, one of the most valuable data to analyze is the keyword used by the visitor to come to your website. Since 2011, major search engines decided to not disclose this data anymore, that’s the reason why you are seeing the “Keyword not defined” data within some of your Matomo (Piwik) reports, also called “not provided”:
The solution
As your keyword data is collected by search engines, each of them provides the searched keywords within different services such as:
- Google Search Console
- Bing/Yahoo Webmaster tools
- Yandex Webmaster
Those services allow website owners to see how many times their website appeared within the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), how bots are crawling your pages, which search terms they used, and more. The drawback is, that they make take this data available only for a short period, you need to log in to all these services to get the insights you need and you cannot get aggregated overall keyword reports (over all search engines combined).
The solution that gives you all this data in Matomo
Would you like to know what the not defined search keywords in Matomo really are? Would you like to combine keywords data from major search engines in one place? Would you like to know how important your website is according to Google and Microsoft Bing and Yahoo?
At InnoCraft, the company behind Matomo, we created a plugin called “Search Engine Performance Keywords”. With this plugin, you will:
- be able to keep the search terms forever
- save time by crossing data from Google and Bing search within Matomo
- get an overview of how Google and Bing are crawling your site
- monitor search rankings and click-through rates for each keyword
1 – Data ownership & data retention
Once more, it is going back to Matomo roots. As Matomo is a Free software, you own the data you collect. Once the import is successful, you will be able to keep the keywords data as long as you wish. In the case of services such as Google Search Console, they will delete the data after 90 days!! Without our plugin you will not be able to analyze precisely how your SEO is doing month by month, year by year.
2 – Save time by using a single interface
Google and Bing have no interest in gathering data coming from various search engines… we do. As a result, with our plugin you can visualize the data coming from those two sources within a single report in order to analyze your SEO in a better way.
You will not have to use spreadsheets anymore and no chance to miss some important keywords which you would maybe miss when you don’t aggregate them in a single report.
3 – Crawl overview check
Both Google and Bing have a crawl “budget”. This budget needs to be optimized in order for search engine bots to consider the most relevant pages. By gathering all the data within Matomo you will have a clear view of how well your website is appreciated by search engines:
4 – Monitor search rankings
The Search Engine Keywords Performance feature allows you to monitor search rankings for a given keyword and see his evolution:
it also gives you the possibility to compare the performances of several keywords in order to see how your website is performing as a whole:
How to get started?
The “Search Engine Keywords Performance” plugin has been developed by the InnoCraft team as a premium feature.
If you are not sure, note that InnoCraft is offering an unconditional and hassle-free 30-day money back guarantee period.
Once you have installed the plugin, follow the guide in order to have it up and running.
The installation process is not difficult in itself but takes some time as it requires to access to Google and Bing APIs.
If you enjoyed this article, you may appreciate the following one about how to integrate ad services to Matomo: Make better online marketing decisions with the AOM plugin.
