Google Instant: Search and SEO

Last week Google announced the launch of its new search function, Google Instant. It is currently only available in the US but will be added to international searches within the next few weeks. Google Instant’s features include predictive text and streaming search results. While Google already lists search suggestions when you type in a search query,

with streaming search results, the results of these suggestions are instantly displayed below the search box as users type.

Almost immediately after the announcement, marketers started wondering if this makes SEO irrelevant or not. To find out, I attended Webmarketing123’s webinar Google Instant & How SEO is Affected. This is what I learned.

What Changes with Google Instant:

• The User Experience
• Impressions and Click-Throughs

What Doesn’t Change with Google Instant:

• Google’s Organic Ranking Algorithm

What Google Instant Means for Search Marketers

Keyword Optimization

Marketers will need to optimize for broader, general “headmatch” terms - keywords that appear near the top of the predictive text box. For example, if you sell flower girl dresses you will need to optimize for “flower” and “flower girl” as well as “flower girl dresses”.

Marketers will need to optimize for both short and long tail keywords. Short tail keywords will get even more impressions because they will be the first to appear in the predictive text box. While long tail keywords probably won’t be in the first page of search results anymore (the predictive text drop-down box moves everything down on the search results page), the quality of search terms will improve as users are given more long-tail suggestions. This means that long tail keywords will get less impressions but more relevant audiences.

Marketers will need to focus on brief, attention-grabbing title and meta descriptions. Searchers will be scanning faster than ever and the text that is shown in search results will need to attract attention.

Impressions and PPC
According to Google, with streaming search results, ad impressions are now counted in these situations:

• The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter or selecting one of the predicted queries.
• The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

These changes to impressions are not just for PPC. Google Keyword Tool shows search volume by impressions so this affects keyword data as well.

Webmarketing123 predicts that impressions and cost-per-click for headmatch terms will increase. They also predict that the quality of clicks will increase as users learn to search using more relevant terms.

Overall, SEO seems as important as ever and it will be interesting to see how Google Instant is going to ultimately affect user behaviour - including search queries, click patterns and page-scanning.