According to the Google Analytics blog, Google Analytics will no longer show you what queries people are using to find your site if that user is signed in to any of Google’s services.

So let’s say I’m logged in to Gmail and sometime during the day I click through to your site after searching Google for a “purple sofa.” Your Analytics account will only show that you’ve gotten a visitor through organic search. It won’t show that I arrived through the phrase “purple sofa.”

This doesn’t affect AdWords traffic, by the way. (Shocking, I know.)

You wanna know how I see it? I’ll tell you anyway…I think Google is setting up the coffins for lazy site owners to start falling in.

I mean, I don’t know about you, but have you noticed how woefully outdated the Google Keyword Tool is? I recently did some press releases for a client based on the upcoming Halloween holiday, and almost all the keywords in Google Keyword Tool gave me 2010 themed keywords.

Halloween 2010
Popular costumes Halloween 2010

Wha??? You’re — SHOCKED?

This is EXACTLY why in previous posts I’ve said that you cannot bet your business on that Google Keyword Tool. This is also EXACTLY why I just said on Monday that I wanted to improve my quality backlinks.

With all this Panda-licious stuff going on, you can only expect that Google is going to spring these kinds of changes on webmasters.

Besides that, they significantly exceeded their last quarterly earnings report. They can’t keep this momentum by doling out all kinds of free data to non-paying advertisers. Welcome to the new reality of freebie search marketing, my friends.

3 Things I suggest you start doing today

Get to know your site visitors – a lot better.
In Creating E-books that are Impulse Buyer Magnets, I stress that if you’re writing an ebook you absolutely, positively must know your buyer. I don’t even recommend that you use keyword tools until you’ve done some serious research on who your potential buyers are, what troubles them, what they love and what they want.

Keyword tools are short sighted because they’re mechanical. Neither the Google Keyword Tool nor data obtained through Google Analytics can beat having 5 potential customers sitting right in front of you.

If you can’t get 5 potential customers to sit down and talk to you, then you need to be consistently hanging out in the places where they are. Forums… blogs… associations. These unobvious ‘keyword tools’ are going to give you a ton of valuable data about what you should be putting on to your site.

(By the way, if you don’t have a copy of Creating E-books That are Impulse Buyer Magnets, then get a copy. The research methods I teach are no-nonsense and can be used outside of the ebook arena.)

Sign up for Google’s Webmaster Tools.
Although Google hath taken away the ability to see keywords used in real-time, they will send you a list of the top 1,000 keywords visitors used to find your site IF you’re using their Webmaster Tools service.

So if you’re not using Webmaster Tools, now’s the time to sign up for the service. And if you are getting more than 1,000 keyword visits a month from Google… oh well.

Create more content that ISN’T search engine friendly.
Bloggers and webmasters have a tendency to think that keywords are the driving force behind everything traffic related. Yes… they are awfully important, but there are other many other factors that drive traffic to your site.

I get quite a bit of traffic to my directional keywords post, even though I don’t use any recognizably popular keywords. None of that traffic, by the way, comes from Google.

Someone on LinkedIn must’ve talked it up because I get a lot of traffic to that post from LinkedIn. And that’s just one of a few quality backlinks I’ve received to it.

If you don’t have linkworthy content like this on your site, then yes… you are essentially at the mercy of Google’s many moods. And that sucks. Big time. Especially if this internet marketing thing is how you make a living.

Don’t always be predictable for the sake of getting into Google. Be predictable for creating great content that people will want to link to. As easy as that sounds, it always eliminates the have’s from the have not’s.

How do you feel about this new attitude adjuster from Google? Love it, hate it, indifferent? Give me your opinion in the comments section…