A lot has been written about Google’s relatively new “instant” search functionality. Some say that it is the death of SEO… Yeah right, we’ve been down that road, many times. Google’s Matt Cutts has also chimed in on Instant Search and SEO. In the Q&A section of his blog. “Q: Does Google Instant kill search engine optimization (SEO)? A: No! Almost every new change at Google generates the question “Will X kill SEO?”…” There are many, many more SEO’s that have varied takes on what Instant Search means to Search Engine Optimization.

Google Instant Search – What is it?

According to Google “Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type.” Resulting in faster searches, Smarter Predictions and Instant Results, all true and the reasons for the improvement are clearly documented on Google’s page. And that’s it in a nutshell, Google will offer next word suggestions based on what you’ve previously entered into the search box.

Example:

If I type in “ipod” here are the results:

Notice that the “ipod touch” is what Google thinks is the most relevant search for “ipod” and “nano” being second. If I continue my search with “ipod touch” I get:

The organic search results and shopping results didn’t change much (of course not! It’s where Google thought I wanted to be when I entered “ipod”) but the paid ads and placements changed considerably since I’ve actually entered “ipod touch” the ads reflect the additional search word. The affect this will have in ads impressions is something Google is still tweaking and you might see variances in ad impressions and changes in quality scores. Now what happens if I didn’t go with Google’s first suggested search term?

Okay now things have changed considerably (although you can’t see most of the changes with the above screen shot). Clearly the shopping results and the paid ads changed and the suggested changes in the search query change as well.

Okay so how will Google Instant change SEO?

Good question! If searchers get into the habit of paying attention to Google’s suggested changes to their search queries and Google does a very good job of predicting what its users want, it may very well change everything! A couple of possible outcomes are (and some early testing supports):

1. The long tail keyword searches that Google suggests to the searchers, and your site ranks very well for, will drive more traffic to your website and long tail searches that are not ‘supported’ by Google Instant may suffer a drop in traffic even if the ‘non-supported’ long tail drives the most qualified traffic.
2.   Another highly possible outcome is sites that reside on the second page of Google’s results for “short tail” keywords will show a decrease in traffic. 

Google Instant Search and Keyword Research

Google Instant offers SEO’s a much deeper look into Google’s back end algorithms. Just as Google’s tilde search (as Carolyn’s wonderful blog “Using the Tilde “~” in Keyword Research for SEO” describes) gives insight to what Google believes are related words, Instant search will help find the ‘long tail’ search terms that will drive the most (and most relevant) traffic to a website. For SEO companies and practitioners that are quick to adopt changes in the SEO world, Instant Search will be a wealth of information we’ve never had from the preverbal “horse’s mouth”.

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