Will Google Instant affect your search strategy?

SEO marketers won’t need to change their strategies to account for Google’s new Instant feature, according to specialists at the search engine.

Google Instant gives web users some relevant search results even whilst they are still typing in the search box: a shortcut to search that is likely to prove useful to mobile internet users when the service is rolled out for them. The service, which launched last week for computer browsers, has seen the deletion of the Enter key from search as users don’t need to finish their sentence to get results.

The innovative new function has sparked concerns amongst SEO marketers about any necessary changes to their strategy.

However, according to Alden DeSoto of Google Analytics, SEO marketers’ current strategies will still remain relevant in the light of Google Search.

DeSoto said: “Should I change my search advertising strategy to serve ads on to partial keywords (e.g. if I sell flowers, should I advertise on “flow”)?” This is not a productive strategy. Please note that ads are triggered based on the ‘predicted query’ and not the stem that the users types in. So, in this example, the partial query ‘flow’ triggers results for the predicted query of ‘flowers’.”

“The only way someone can see your ad for ‘flow’ is if they specifically searched for that word and hit enter or clicked search. And since you sell flowers, it’s not likely that your ad for flowers will be served alongside such a generic and irrelevant word.”

DeSoto added that the Google Instant would not change search rankings, and that search queries using Instant would be tracked as they have always been.