Leveraging Google Instant Search for SEO

As the dust begins to settle with the launch of Google Instant, conclusions on how it will affect SEO and overall search behavior are becoming more defined. For info on how it affects PPC in AdWords, this page has all you need to know. For the most part, SEO remains largely unaffected by Instant, which is comforting after the abundance of fear-inducing articles claiming the end of SEO. However, there are a lot of things with Instant we are certainly paying attention to for our clients and we’ll share a few of them with you.  First, understanding how it affects the long-tail is important if you target these kind of keyword phrases. Since Instant offers up suggestions under your query and alters the results accordingly, many would assume that users will select one of the suggested terms instead of completing the original long-tail query they had in mind. But we think it’s more of an opportunity and agree with this post in that Instant will actually prompt users to use suggested long-tail terms who might not have originally. Marketers would be wise to use the long-tail suggestions as part of their long-tail SEO strategy. On the web analytics front, many wondered which term would be passed as the referring term if the query isn’t completed (finished or unfinished query) and Google has confirmed the first suggested term under your query, which is the one in which Instant is showing results on, will indeed be passed as the referrer. If you do not have SEO strategies in-place that address Instant, work with your SEO team to get them in place today.