September 26, 2010 in Blog by clicklobby

Google Instant = SEO is Dead?

When Google Instant was launched, a lot of people were saying that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be dead. One of the first few people to post about it was Steve Rubel. This is what he said:

no two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick – and everyone saw the same results. That’s what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors.

Basically, he expects users to change their search behaviour. Before, users just searched for a certain keyword phrase (usually 2-4 words long), hit enter and the results of relevant websites are displayed. So SEO targets those 2-4 keywords and tries to rank your website high on the search results. However, if users start to tweak their searches, that would result in many other keywords being used. So much so that it will be impossible to run a SEO campaign to target ALL these keywords.

We think that it is still too early to tell how Google Instant will affect SEO. Would users really change their search keywords just because they see results now instantly? Perhaps, if the results shown are not relevant, or they see something that interests them.

Ultimately, if your website’s SEO is targetted at relevant keywords, and provides interesting content, that should not cause the user to search for different terms. So it still boils down to providing relevant and interesting content.