Another Important SEO Piece to Google Instant

Google Instant has been underway for several weeks now, and so far, all is well.  It works well in aiding users to locate what they’re searching for more quickly, it reduces misspelled search queries, and it shows location specific results.  Although users have the option to turn Google Instant off, I don’t see why many users would choose to do so at this point, and that is important for SEO experts to consider.

Google instant is only active if users are signed into their Google accounts, which may not be as often as Google would like.  Also, how likely are users to sign into their Google accounts to do a search?  We’ve been used to regular Google searches for so long now, that are we suddenly so crazy about Google Instant that we’re going to take the extra time to log in before performing a search, when the whole point of Google Instant is to reduce search time?

Google Instant will be available on mobile devices later this year, and most mobile users tend to be logged into their Google accounts on a regular basis.  So anyone performing a Google search on their mobile phone will likely be using Google Instant.  More and more people are using smart phones that require data packages, so a large portion of the world’s population is performing Google searches right from their mobile phones.  Once Google Instant is released for mobile devices, and as more and more people use their mobile devices to search the internet, Google Instant will see more use, and users will experience quicker, location specific Google search results.

What does this mean for SEO experts?  Not a whole lot yet.  Good old fashioned SEO practices of providing high quality content, videos, and links will still strongly effect how highly a website ranks in a Google search results list.  However, after some time with Google Instant on computers and mobile devices, SEO experts may want to review trends in keywords, keyword statistics, and their website’s ranking.  It may be that SEO keyword practices will need to change slightly to adapt to Google Instant’s predictive text, or it may be that users are still performing long tail keyword searches just as often, and SEO experts won’t need to change a thing.  Until then!