Whenever Google rolls out a new search feature – Personalization, Universal Search, Search Suggest, Real Time search, etc. – people go crazy. Blog posts come out saying this is the end of SEO, or you need to do X, Y and Z now, because this is going to change the game, etc. This has always been the case, and probably always will be. Everyone wants to have the first post, the first tweet, about the latest and greatest news in search.
Google Instant is not unlike Search Suggest. That’s all it is – a suggestion to save you some typing time. The main thing it will change is people are probably going to try a lot of different queries before settling on one. Searchers have done this for years, though – refining a query to explore a topic. Now they can do that even faster! What it does do for search marketers, though, is provide an extra source to conduct keyword research. Now we can see not only how many people per month do a particular search, but also what Google displays as they arrive at typing in those searches.
Google Instant didn’t even make a big splash on PPC results. Google Instant also displays paid ads, and impressions incur under 3 different scenarios:
- The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
- The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
- The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.
As you can see, the team at Nina Hale, Inc., hasn’t noticed an increase in impressions across the board for our clients. The Google team frequently rolls out improvements and new functionality to search – sometimes they are game changers, but for now it’s business as usual!
