How Google Instant Will Affect SEO

If Google Instant is everything that Google hopes it will be, the entire industry of search engine optimizers and marketers has some work to do.

Just in case you haven’t heard the clamor web-wide regarding the new capability, here’s a brief description:

Google Instant is what Google is calling the next wave in its goal to make search more targeted, faster, and better able to understand you and what you want to see.

• Explicitly, Google Instant (per Google) combines predictive search (which we have already seen for years) with a real time visualization of the results of that search.
• Google Instant displays what it predicts you are searching for, allowing you to not only see your results faster, but also see results along the way as you type.

We Believe This Change Is Significant!

Though we caution advertisers to realize that all prognostications on the impact of Google Instant on user behavior at this point are just that – supposition.  This article will discuss Google Instant, what its goal is from a user perspective, what we predict this change will mean for SEO and PPC performance, and how we plan to test our prediction.

What Is Google Instant Trying To Do?

For years, Google has tried to predict what you were searching for on their engine.  Google does this to (a) reduce the time it takes for a searcher to log a query (and therefore provide a better user experience) and (b) because it saves Google in processing time with its support services (if you take two seconds to type a query versus four seconds, given the number of searches conducted, Google estimates this saves them 360 million hours of data center time annually. This is not going away.  Google will continue to try to predict your search, as you probably have experienced with the drop down menu you now see – like in the example below for “Covario.”

Google Instant is taking this one step further by adding the visualization and changing the results page that gets updated in real-time, as you type.

What Does Google Instant Mean For SEO?

The first key change Google Instant causes is in the drop down “suggestion box” that attempts to predict queries.  This, depending on the query, occupies one and sometime up to three of the advertisement positions on the “all important” first page.  Google is rendering the paid and universal search listings as high as possible, but is pushing the SEO results “below the fold.”  Whereas in the past, a standard web search would yield four organic listings above the fold, this does not happen now until searchers commit to their search and the page re-renders.

This means that top ranking is now more important than ever. We believe users are less likely to scroll below the fold as related results are instantly reconfigured as the search query is completed.  Before a user would type in a search query, check the results, refine the search and then repeat the process until they found what they were looking for, there is now the potential that Google Instant helps with the delivery of this process.

Here is another example for the term “home mortgage”.  There are no less than four (4) paid listings showing in the prime Google Instant real estate and only one organic listing.  The four (4) organic results return once the searcher commits to the search and the standard search page is rendered as the suggestion box recedes.

From an SEO perspective – if Google Instant drives the changes we expect – CTRs on positions 1 and 2 organically will rise at the expense of positions 3 and 4.  Being 1 and 2 is now key.

This means that SEO tactics must change.  Traditionally, we’ve seen that users tend to spend a good portion of their time examining meta descriptions and we often recommend placing calls to action in the meta description to grab searchers’ attention and get them to click. However, with results changing so quickly, we see calls to action potentially moving into the Title tag as users spend less time examining the results and will rely more on those parts of the result they can examine quickly.

Perhaps the biggest impact of Google Instant is the impact the function will have on long-tail searches.  Let’s say a user goes to Google to search for “Las Vegas Hotel Deals.”

• After typing in just “Las Vegas” the user sees a paid ad for Vegas.com and the organic entry for the Las Vegas Tourism website.
• What is the impact of those impressions on the user’s search behavior?
• How likely is it that users will abandon their search and click on one of those results or the map of Las Vegas that appears just below the top paid result?
• Or, are users more likely to finish their search and ignore the populating results?
• Will the page populating with results just become insignificant noise to searchers as they continue to use Google as they have been for years?

Arguments can be made for and against the increasing importance of long-tail, but there will be some effect from Google’s Instant search.  Our belief is that Google has tested the accuracy of their predictive search results over the past years.  Our bet is that it is pretty accurate – say 25% of the time it predicts correctly (this is a made up number – just for example).  That means that 25% of long-tail searches will be rendered correctly off the first keyword and some percent of users will click on the results.  The other 75% will modify and append their searches as results appear and are unsatisfactory.  For the 75% it can be argued that long-tail will gain importance because users will see right away that their initial search wasn’t going to work, and will thus mold their search query until they see results more to their liking.  It will also be interesting to see whether the conversion rates on those “predicted” results that get activated improve or degrade versus the full search query conversion rates – something that is measurable over time and will ultimately dictate user experience.

We recommend continuing to incorporate your long-tail terms into your SEO, and closely monitor the before-and-after performance to see how user behavior has adapted to these changes.  Do this for the top 10-25 multi-keyword phrases for the SEO program for 30 days.  Then, if the performance degrades, you know that SEO tactics on long-tail have to change.

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