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Google Instant and Google Suggest - SEO Opportunities with the New Google Instant and Google Suggest Tools
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Do you ever feel like the world is accelerating? Well, Google does. Google rolled out Google Suggest a while back, and today announced 'Google Instant.' For those who 'sign in' to their Google accounts, as they type in search results Google will 'instantly' deliver search results. It is meant to be more helpful to searchers, but it also presents SEO opportunities for businesses and marketers. This tutorial post investigates.
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: September 8, 2010
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Contents:
Google Instant: How it Works, SEO Opportunities
Google rolled out its latest search feature, Google Suggest, on September 8th. Here's the scoop from the official Google page (http://www.google.com/instant/)
Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.
The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.
Basically, if you are signed in to your Google account, and start typing, you will see 'instant' search results begin to appear in the search below. It's very fast, and very cool.
SEO Opportunities. Assuming that many people are either signed into Google and/or leave the default setting 'on,' Google Instant may be somewhat of a game changer for search engine optimization. Why? Because it gives priority to word order. Take a traditional, high value search such as -
Online Insurance Quote
vs.
Insurance Quote Online
Here are the natural results in order for each -
Online Insurance Quote -
- www.esurance.com
- www.2insure4less.com
- www.progressive.com
- www.allstate.com
Insurance Quote Online -
- www.esurance.com
- www.progressive.com
- www.insurance.com
- www.netquote.com
The point? In terms of the search and visual experience, the migration to Google Instant provides not only instant feedback to the searcher but a huge boost to whoever gets the word order right in terms of his SEO. Once again, so much of SEO success goes to figuring out the tightest match between what your customer types in and what your (on page) organization is in terms of page tags vs. keywords.
How do you figure out word order? This is really tough, as few of the keyword tools are very helpful. I like to actually use the "quote" feature on Google itself and do two different searches -
"Online Insurance Quote" - 582, 000 results.
vs.
"Insurance Quote Online" - 775,000 results.
Admittedly, not a perfect sample since we are sampling web pages rather than actual searches... but a rough proxy for which word order is more common.
Google Suggest: How it Works, SEO Opportunities
A second, related, feature of Google is called Google Suggest. This feature is more widely available and provides 'realtime' suggestions as the user types in his or her search query. Rather than changing the results themselves, this feature changes the suggested search terms. Again, it favors a word order approach to SEO. Figuring out not only your customer search queries is important; determining the most common, exact word order is important as well.
For example, here are Google suggest results for 'Insurance Quotes' -
So what happens here is the user is suggested by the most common word orders. Once again, Google streamlines the word and our user searchers will likely snowball towards the most common word orders as humans rely more and more on Google to suggest to them how to input their queries. The long term implication here is, again, the importance of focusing on not only the most common keywords but the most common word orders.
Best Matching at Work at Google
Google clearly works on a principle of best matching in terms of its search results. Assuming (for example), that there are two websites that are EQUAL in terms of their links (PageRank), and EQUAL in terms of their keyword density and all other factors, the website that has the closest (or exact) match to the search query will win out.
For many searches, the level of word order does not matter. But for very competitive searches, guessing the most common word order may be that tiny little edge that puts your site at No. 1 vs. No. 2. And, in all cases, you should try to get as close as possible to your customers. Google Instant and Google Suggest are just two new innovations from Google that encourage us to laser focus on our customers and their search queries, now down to the level of the order of words. Or is it the word order?
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