Webcast: Google Instant’s Impact on SEO
You’ve likely started using Google Instant in your own searches, but what does it mean for your business? Many have posed the question of whether Instant’s launch will mean the death of SEO as we know it and whether this new feature will dramatically alter user search behavior, specifically long-tail keyword searches.
In a joint webcast from Optify and Search Marketing Now, speakers Erez Barak, VP of Products and Co-Founder at Optify, and Ian Everdell, Usability Consultant at Mediative, delivered a spirited discussion, in which the presenters provided their own insights about these topics, backed with research conducted by their respective companies. In addition, Barak and Everdell participated in an audience-facilitated Q&A session following their presentations. Below we have included a link to the full recording of the webinar, as well as Q+A generated by webinar attendees.
Other resources:
- Download the presentation
- Google Changing the Rules (in an Instant), yet SEO Lives on
- Users’ Search Habits Appear Unaltered by Google Instant’s Launch
Q&A: 9 takeaways on what Google Instant means for SEO
We collected the following questions during the webinar, and have provided answers below. The Q&A below was answered by both Optify and Ian Everdell of Mediative.
- Are you seeing any changes with the keywords driving organic traffic since the launch of Instant?
The number of long tail searches haven’t changed very much, but the long tail search terms themselves are changing. If the actual keywords that users are searching for to find your company are changing, then you should make sure to optimize for those new keywords, and that your landing pages are optimized for conversion and aligned with your messaging. - Do you think companies should change the way they do SEO?
No, the durable elements of SEO are still the same. What companies should change is the way they collect and analyze data. SEO has always been a means to get better business results. For example, in Optify, we measure not just the number of visits and leads a company got from a specific source, but also tie it to the revenue that source generated. If a specific keyword generated more revenue than another keyword, the company will know it needs to focus on that keyword. - Instant release was accompanied by several recent releases by Bing and Yahoo!, mostly related to Social Media. Do you think a company should manage SEO differently for Bing than it does for Google?
The fundamentals of the algorithms for Bing and Google are similar, and even though they respond differently toward some optimization strategies, in the end, you should apply the same SEO strategy. What’s important to pay attention to is measurement. Ranking on Bing typically varies from ranking on Google, especially in terms of international rankings. Measure each engine and country separately when evaluating your priorities for executing an SEO campaign Fundamentally, the engines build their algorithms to try to return the most relevant and useful content to searchers. If you optimize your site for users and follow SEO best practices, you’ll be farther ahead than if you try to juggle the intricacies of multiple engines. - How has blended search affected SEO?
If by blended, the user means universal search, like the different results you see within a SERP, such as local, video and real time, these features have meant a few things for SEO. Ranking for these different results is actually easier than ranking for keywords in the regular results. Universal search is still an underused opportunity, therefore businesses have more of a level playing field in this aspect of search. These “blended” results don’t adhere to a constant UI on the SERP just yet. A constant UI may be the future for universal search, however. Blended search requires being more aware of the landscape around your result. Images, videos, and other types of results that are inserted into the “10 blue links” can create visual barriers that change the way searchers scan through the page. SEO fundamentals are still important, but being aware of how you rank in relation to where blended results are likely to appear is also important. - Any signs that Bing or Yahoo plan to follow suit?
It’s too early to tell for sure, but indications suggest that Yahoo and Bing may not necessarily follow suit in this way. Take a look at their Search Overload campaign, which suggests that they may see Instant as somewhat distracting to the user experience. We think that Bing’s position is that this is distracting, and Bing’s relatively refined search results, ‘provides the cure.’ - What have you seen since the launch of Google Instant with a websites organic rankings? Have they typically improved or dropped? How about bounce rates?
Despite Instant’s launch, organic rankings have not been altered any more than they typically are by Google. SEO rankings have not dramatically improved nor dropped as a result of Google Instant. We don’t expect bounce rates to change much either. Where we might see changes in bounce rate is with the recent introduction of Instant Previews – searchers can decide whether a site is suited to their needs without actually visiting the page, so bounce rates may decrease. - From SEM perspective, should we bid on the keywords that Google Instant suggests?
While SEM is not the area where Optify provides the most guidance to customers, it would be speculative at best for us to opine here, since we haven’t taken a closer look at the data for the SEM cases to support any statements we would make. That said, it would be reasonable to suggest that common practice would be to assess whether the predicted terms that Google supplies present valuable real-estate for you to bid on and determine what your overall CPC budget is for your campaign. One thing Optify can help you do is track your PPC for these keywords, so that you can track and determine if a spend on these partial or predicted terms is worthwhile. Optify does provide guidance and insight on SEO. So if the question were, should we optimize our keywords that Google Instant suggests, our answer is no. - What percentage are using Instant? How many have turned it off? When do most people stop and select the predictive phrases? At the first word or second & beyond?
Google has been pretty quiet about the number of people using Instant. Speculation puts it at a pretty small amount relative to the total Google user base (some studies based on what little information can be gleaned from analytics put it around 5%). It’s even harder to tell how many people have turned it off.
In our research, the percentage of the search query that participants typed decreased in 25% of the tasks. In those cases, they typically typed about 90% of the query. However, this is dependent on the query – when we asked people to look for “home depot”, the average amount of query typed was only 50% of the total length (i.e., they only typed “home “). Anecdotally, it didn’t seem that participants used suggestions to add more than one word to their query. - Does Instant change people’s search patterns in terms of being distracted by the queue of results?
As Google said when recapping their research, we typically saw that searchers would focus on the search box while typing, and then once they had decided on a search term would look down at the results. The biggest exception here was when the changing results contained images – as they appear and disappear, they are much more visually salient than the changing text results and tended to distract the participants.
However, based on a quick survey of forum posts and social media, it seems that most of the people who have turned Instant off do so because they find it distracting.
Ian Everdell is a Usability Consultant at Mediative, one of North America’s largest digital marketing companies. You can find him blogging, on Twitter, and on LinkedIn.
