Just when you thought you finalized your Serarch Engine Optimization strategy, Google’s new “real-time” search results are changing the way Internet users submit queries.
Google’s search team threw a change up to web developers everywhere with the introduction of Google Instant. The new online search engine returns results more quickly and predicts search queries as the user types.
As a result, many industry experts are suspecting a shift in user behavior. The following excerpt is from Matt Cutts personal blog. [Disclaimer: Matt Cutts is one of several Googlers who answer questions online and sometimes for the press.]
“The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.”
Due to the increased number of times your website appears as a Google search result, whether for an instant or prolonged period of time, the number of impressions determined by your analytic software will increase. As published by the official Google blog, impressions are now measured in three ways:
- Your site is displayed in search results as a response to a user’s completed query (e.g. by pressing “enter” or selecting a term from autocomplete). This is the traditional model.
With Google Instant, we also measure impressions in these new cases:
- The user begins to type a term on Google and clicks on a link on the page, such as a search result, ad, or a related search.
- The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.
Want to see Google Instant in action? Watch the video introduction below:
Links
– Google Instant – Link
– Matt Cutts – Link
– Google Blog – Link