Akavit

Last Wednesday (10/8/2010), Google announced their vision and future of Internet search by releasing Google Instant. Although initially appearing as merely small changes improving usability, the reality is that we are likely witnessing a fairly dramatic shift in the way people search.

The most visible change in the “new” Google is how search results are dynamically displayed while the user is still entering their query. No longer are you required to click or hit ‘enter’ in order to see result sets. For example, if you’re searching for the word “restaurant”, you start seeing results as soon as you type the letter “r”. Furthermore, as you continue typing the remaining letters, the visible result set dynamically changes to reflect what Google believes you are searching for. In essence, Google tries to predict your search before you’ve finished entering it. It is trying to determine your intent.

This is major change from the “old” way of searching (prior to last Wednesday) when you typed in a word or phrase, hit ‘enter’ and waited for Google to return a set of (hopefully) relevant results. If the results did not reflect what you were actually searching for, you were forced to change your search phrase, hit ‘enter’ again and wait for the next result set. This iterative process was in many cases repeated several times before arriving at something useful.

With the newly released system, a user receives immediate visual feedback on the quality of results. This in turn lets that user modify their search phrase while simultaneously observing the exact effect of the change on the result set. In effect, the new process allows for more results to be shown in a much shorter span of time. The official estimate from Google is that it will save an average of two seconds per search query. If the average person performs around forty searches per day, this translates into 7 hours or saved time per year!

As you can imagine, this seemingly small change will drastically impact Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy and best practices, but not even Google knows exactly the impact of their changes. The majority of companies offering SEO-related services focus on tactics targeting Google’s secret algorithms. Our approach has consistently focused on a blend of those same tactics but with the addition of modeling user search behavior. The fact is that the modeling portion is about to become a whole lot more significant and web sites that want to rank at the top must embrace this new strategy.

Google’s recent updates bring about a few tactical issues to consider for your web site:

Although Google may not know the full ramification of their changes on SEO, it does know that the new system will produce more overall search results. For most web sites, more is better as it presents additional opportunities to appear in users’ search results, hopefully resulting in more actual visitors. It also means that it’s more important than ever to make sure your web site appears higher up on the results page based on your target keywords. In the new system, users are more likely to scan only the first couple of results before potentially modifying their search phrase if they don’t see something they like.

Several clients have asked if the new model changes the number of keywords needed on your site. This particular question spawned from the fact that Google might return relevant search results after only one or two keystrokes. This begs the question of whether your site should include partial words in your Meta tags. For example, if your site is targeting fans of the Denver Broncos, should you include ‘br’ or ‘bro’ as keywords since Google could conceivably return a relevant result set from only those few letters?

The short answer is ‘no’. Results from a few letters are still based on complete words.

As you can see from the image above, Google is attempting to predict what you are searching for (the complete word or phrase) and dynamically returning results for that complete phrase. As you type, the prediction may change and thus presenting a different result set.

So you can still use the same keywords you use today, but you should strongly consider shorter keywords for the following reasons:

The shorter your keyword or keyword phrase, the fewer keystrokes it will take for a user to type. This means your site link will be shown in the result set at an early part of the query process (this assumes your link is returned for your targeted keywords, which it should if you practice good SEO).

This does not mean long-tail keywords are suddenly irrelevant. If you use strong long-tail keywords Google may predict the entire phrase after a few keystrokes and show those results. See the following example:

So what should you do to make sure your site continues to rank high on Google? You should definitely start formulating a long term strategy focused more around user behavior, but the good news is that you have some time. Google is currently only making the change to their standard web search. It should take several months before they launch it to mobile browsers and beyond.

By getting your websites ready and optimized for the future of search today, you’ll be in prime position when Google Instant becomes the Internet standard. Then you can sock it to the competition. And who doesn’t like socking the competition?

If you have any questions or would like some help preparing for future SEO best practices, please contact Mike Mathews or Thomas Dahl at Akavit.