Will Google Instant affect your site?

This week Google Instant launched.

It’s a new way of searching where Google tries to complete your search by predicting what keyword(s) you are searching for. As you type more letters the search results change instantaneously as if by magic.

This is big news for Google who also announced this week they have 1 billion users every week serving up over 1 billion searches a day.

That’s lot of zero’s!

But is this really good news for you as a real estate website or blog owner?

The jury is debating this very subject as we speak because it’s just not that simple Let’s take a look at a few of the issues:

Changes in search habits.

It will be easier for users to refine their search criteria by typing more words and looking at the results than scrolling. The users screen size will determine how many results will be visible without scrolling.

Google’s query suggestions will almost certainly become more important as we get used to scanning the search dropdown.

BTW – if you don’t like Google Instant you can turn it off at the right of the search box. Turning off uses a cookie, so if you clear cookies the feature turns right back on again.

Long tail keyword search problems.

Searches may actually now find something to click on before typing their originally intended search term – therefore to show up in search results, it may become more important to optimize for shorter keyword searches.

SEO campaigns including long multi-word keywords could see a drop in traffic for those keywords as a result of streaming search.

For example, if a site has optimized for ‘Tampa real estate agent’, that term may lose search traffic as searchers find that the shorter ‘Tampa real estate’ returns several relevant looking results, so they may not need to finish their original search term.

In this graphic (click for larger image) you will note that I only needed to type “Tampa re” to start getting relevant results – unfortunately my screen is dominated by adwords – only one organic result is visible.

Which leads me to my next point:

Google adwords more prominent.

By delivering ‘streaming search’ Google is potentially ‘helping’ users find relevant results with less search term queries but it looks like Google’s search engine has become a Google Adwords delivery engine.

Most of the organic results are now hidden below the fold especially as less users will scroll down to see more.

Rank checking software.

If you use any of these the future results will be set haywire.

Here a video outlining the changes in Google’s own words.

Is Google’s main objective to “help” the consumer is is it darker that that – a deliberate move to encourage users to click on revenue generating adwords?

So isn’t it interesting that almost every technological change affecting the Web now has implications that affect businesses large and small as well as impacting individual users?

What’s your prediction or concern for the future of search and SEO?

Please share your thoughts!

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