When you have finished reading this article I believe you will have a better understanding of the new Google Instant Search functionality and what implications it could have on your real estate websites SEO strategy. Google Instant has not yet been released on the google.com.au URL but will be rolled out globally over the next few months.
Q. So what is Google Instant?
A. Instant search results as you type. We will look at an example later.
Google believes that the averge search time for users will be reduced by 2-5 seconds and that you will be displayed smarter predictions of what you are about to search for. The video below provides a good explenation.
Let’s look at an example. A searcher looking for a house to buy in Rockingham will start their search by typing in something like “House for sale in Rockingham” then hit enter. A traditional search will then look at that entire phrase and return the most relevant results. Using Google instant, the searcher will see results as soon as they have started typing. First they will see results for”house”, then “house for sale” and so on.
Because searchers will have instant results, the chances of them clicking on a result before they have completed typing what they had intended to type has increased dramatically. If your sites rank well for the phrase “House for sale in Rockingham” you could have lost them at “house”
This is where our SEO strategies are going to have to change somewhat. We will need to start optimizing for more phrases that are shorter, increasing our chances of being found at an earlier rather than later stage of the user typing their search. So how do we achieve this?
We allready know that the Google Algorhyth “Caffeine” loves dynamic content, it is continuously scanning websites that produce regular content and indexing those pages in the results within minutes. The power of a blog has just become more powerfull. If there was ever a good time to implement blogging on your own sites then this is it.
I also believe that with the invent of Google Instant, ranking for a particular keyword or phrase beyond the 1st page and even at the bottom of page 1 is going to be irrelevant.
This new functionality is still brand new, over the coming weeks it will become clearer as to other changes we will see from an SEO perspective. You can find all those updates right here where I will endeavour to explain them to you.