Businesses will be forced to change their SEO strategies following the release of Google’s new Instant Search product, designed to provide multiple pages of search results as users type in order to save time.
The product was announced at a special Google event overnight, with tech press and industry veterans tipping the new feature will force rivals Microsoft Bing and Yahoo to introduce similar products of their own.
Jim Stewart, chief executive of Stewart Media, says the new results will mean businesses need to start ranking around multiple keywords.
“What this means for businesses is that they will have to change their strategies to try and rank around more key phrases, rather than just one or two. The instant search changes the focus from just one phrase to several,” he says.
Google also announced the new feature on its official blog, saying it’s designed around making
searches quicker and easier – Google expects users will save between two and five seconds for each search query.
The new feature works by having users type in their search queries as normal. But instead of waiting for one page of search results to appear, multiple pages of search results appear as the user types.
This means instead of waiting to see one page of search results, users will see multiple pages.
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“Google Instant is search-before-you-type,” the company says on its blog. “Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions — yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.”
“Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!”
But Stewart says this convenience also means businesses need to change their approach to SEO. While businesses might have relied on ranking first for just one search query, the multiple pages of search results mean businesses have to rank highly for any number of phrases.
“What this does is break up the key phrases. Before this, you were trying to rank highly for a key phrase. But now, you see results for different variations of that phrase. So you might be searching for “Melbourne clown party”, but you will also see results for “Melbourne clown” as you type.”
“This means businesses need more content on their sites around these key phrases, so you can rank around variations of the same phrase. You’re seeing multiple pages of search results, and you need to rank highly in all of them.”
Reseo chief executive Chris Thomas says the change is “huge”, and although it’s still early days and the industry still hasn’t seen how users will respond, he predicts businesses will need to start thinking about SEO differently.
“It’s going to start impacting keyword research. The new feature gives a lot of predicted searches. For example, if you sell surf wear, and people start searching for that keyword, there will be a lot of predicted search queries popping up and we’ll probably start integrating those into our SEO.”
“It is still early days, so we’re going to have to see how it’ll impact analytics and all those sorts of things. Google says it won’t change the impact of search results, but I think it will impact traffic if businesses aren’t doing their work around various keywords and phrases.”
Adam Bunn, head of SEO at Britain search firm Greenlight, says businesses will need to start using shorter key phrases to keep their traffic high.
“For example, if a website has optimised for and holds good rankings for ‘cheap car insurance UK’, that term may lose search traffic as UK users find that the shorter ‘cheap car insurance’ returns several relevant looking results, negating the need to finish their sentence.”
Google said the new Instant Search feature will use a group of caching technologies to aggregate results pages and make sure browsers keep up with the rapid results. “In the end, we needed to produce a system that was able to scale while searching as fast as people can type and think — all while maintaining the relevance and simplicity people expect from Google.”
But the release of the new feature also seems to be a subtle dig at Silicon Valley rival, Apple. Its new advertisement for the product features shots of search queries being typed under the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.
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As Valleywag points out, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is a big fan of Dylan and folk music in general. The publication says the advertisement could be a way of getting under Apple’s skin.
“An intense rivalry opened between Apple and Google when the latter’s Android smartphone platform squared off against Apple’s iPhone. The resulting executive rage manifest itself in an epic fight between Jobs and his Google counterpart Eric Schmidt (a fight followed by a sort of public reconciliation).”
The new feature is currently being rolled out for US users, and will be available for international users over the next few months.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
