Google Instant – might not be good for most businesses
The DzineClub team is very excited about searching on Google Instant but as we study our behavior on how we use Google Instant, we are fairly disappointed with what it means for most Small to Medium Businesses. We see Google Instant as great for searchers and overall search experience but not great from a SEO perspective.
As we were testing Google Instant, we realised that we are very keen to see what is in our screen and not scroll. If we want better results, we were more interested in changing / appending search terms on the search bar. Essentially we did not even scroll down to see the bottom of the page but were very focused on what was on the first few results.
Google Instant for Small/Medium Businesses – Good and Bad
Bad – Searchers might click on what’s in front of them than go through pages or scroll
Essentially Google Instant will get users used to getting the info straight away and clicking on it. Which means that the top 10 links will get more clicks. So if you are on the front page, you will get more traffic while the rest of the pages will get less traffic. This is not great news for companies which are fighting to get to the first page but have been getting trickled traffic on the other pages. When you use Google Instant, you are more inclined to stay on the search box and tweak your search terms there than to even scroll down to the 7-10th positions.
Good – Searchers will add words to make search more specific
We doubt most users will even scroll down to the bottom, but will be more used to changing the search term on the instant bar to get relevant results.
This is a good thing as you can now tweak your SEO to not target those broad keywords to get on the front page but more specific keywords to get users who tweak their keywords to get those relevant results.
Overall
Overall we see this as a win for the users, but not necessarily for the companies unless you are already on the front page. Searchers will be using more broad terms and only going specific if they can’t find results. We think that the bottom dwellers even on the front page will lose a bit of traffic and subsequent pages will lose even more.
