A reporter (I believe she was from AdAge) attending Google's Q&A about Google Instant pointed out that the new search feature tends to favor big brands. This isn'treally surprising, as it is these brands that are more likely to be searchedfor most often. After all, they're big because people know them.
Do you thinkGoogle Instant is a threat to SEO? Share your thoughts below.
iCrossing has a list of brands that come up when you enter each letter of the alphabet(not all are brands, but many are). A is for Amazon (not Apple), B is for Bankof America, M is for Mapquest (not Microsoft), N is for Netflix, P is forPandora, V is for Verizon, and Y is for Yahoo.
You must keep in mind, however, that the instant results are personalized.Google takes into account things like your location and your surfing habitswhen providing you results.
Google Instant doesn't necessarily make things any easier on small businesses,but it's showing big brands in cases where Google probably would've suggestedbig brands anyway. If users do a lot of local searches, it's possible thatGoogle could show more local results (including small businesses) for thoseusers, I'm speculating.
Steve Rubel says that Google Instant makes SEO irrelevant. "Here's what this means,"he says. "No two people will see the same web. Once a single search woulddo the trick - and everyone saw the same results. That's what made searchengine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweakingtheir searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback.When you get feedback, you change your behaviors."
He's not wrong about that, but I'm not sure that makes SEO irrelevant. Googlehas been showing different results to different users for quite a while now.This is really just an extension of that.
Businesses might want to try (and have other people try) doing searches forkeywords that they would expect people to use to find their site. See whatcomes up (keep in mind the personalization) and work from there. Easier saidthan done no doubt, but it's something to consider. Think about what kinds ofpeople will be interested in your products and what other kind of searches theymight be doing. It's not a science, but again, perhaps something worthconsidering. It might mean getting to know your customers better, which can' tbe a bad thing anyway. Maybe it means asking them to take surveys. Maybe itdoesn't.
The whole thing doesn't help organic SEO's case in the old SEO vs PPC debate. I'll give Rubel that.
Speaking of PPC, Google says Google Instant changes the way it countsimpressions. "It's possible that this feature may increase or decreaseyour overall impression levels," says Google'sDan Friedman. "However, Google Instant may ultimately improve the qualityof your clicks since it helps users type queries that more directly connectthem with the answers they need."
Trevor Claiborne of the Google Analytics Team says thatAnalytics users might notice some fluctuations in AdWords impression volume andtraffic for organic keywords. "For example, you may find that certainkeywords receive significantly more or fewer impressions moving forward,"he says.
You should
read this post on the Google Webamster Central blog. It says that impressionsare measured in three ways: the traditional way, when a user clicks on a linkthat appears as they begin to type, and when a user stops typing, and theresults are
displayedfor a minimum of 3 seconds.
Sidenote: Google's Matt Cutts weighed in onthe whole will Google Instant kill SEO thing. "Almost every new change atGoogle generates the question 'Will X kill SEO?' Here's an video I did lastyear, but it still applies," he says. change
SEO."The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possiblethat people will learn to search differently over time," says Cutts."For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With GoogleInstant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed anenergy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myselfreading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of thesearch results."
Google Instant will likely become increasingly important to search marketing,because not only will it roll out to more countries (it's starting in the U.S.and a select few others), but it will soon come to mobile and browser searchboxes. Each of these factors will greatly increase how often Instant results aredisplayed.
The mobile factor actually has implications for Google retaining a substantialamount of mobile searches in general. The better (and quicker) Google can giveresults on any kind of query, the less reason users have to go to differentapps to acquire certain information.
Google clearly said that
rankingstays the same with Google Instant, but
it will change the way peoplesearch. It will affect their search behavior, and that is what
search marketers are going to have to think about more than ever. You shouldalso consider that some people will simply deactivate the feature, leaving themopen to Google's standard results.
Original Post by Chris Crum