Over the past month you may have noticed the many changes going on with Google. One of the biggest ones has been the release of instant search. Basically this means that as you begin to type your search, Google “guesses” what you are looking for letter by letter based upon the most popular searches in their database.

You don’t even need to complete typing the words as Google “reads your mind”. In many cases it has guessed my search by the time I’m 4 or 5 letters into it. I find it quite an amazing technology.

How does it affect you?

If you want to get as much traffic as possible, you will need to show up in the top 3 listings that Google predicts because initial research is showing that most people stop typing when they see results that start to match.

I suggest that you might need to take some time to sit there and do some typing of keywords into Google to see what it is displaying and what websites are showing up. Take notes on what Google is predicting and what sites are showing up as you type.  After you have some sites written down, go back and review what those sites are doing to get the high rankings and see if there is a way to emulate or top them.

Picking good keywords and focusing your SEO may become even more important than it already is if you want to get organic traffic.

Local search integration

Along with the instant search, Google has suddenly started playing around with the Google Places results and mixing them in with the organic search results. In Australia, we have seen the map move to the right sidebar and push the Google AdWords results down.

Google has also done things like show 3 organic results then follow them with 7 Places results before returning to organic results again. To really confuse things, at one stage they expanded the Places results so that they looked like normal organic listings with title, description and link.

Hopefully this will settle down as their testing phases finish.

From a business angle, instant search combined with the localization of SERPs will make for very interesting times ahead.

Results returned by local city

You may have noticed that Google is also trying to bring back results for your local area through the automatic selection of your city. While this isn’t really an issue for the promotion of many affiliate products, it may affect what results show if there is a local company supplying a solution similar to yours. For example, you promote a health product that is also being advertised online by a local chemist.

I think that we will just have to watch what happens with this and see how it continues to evolve over time.

I know it certainly doesn’t pick my city properly because of how our ISPs allocate IP addresses. Google thinks I’m about 100km away from where I really am.

One thing is for sure though, it doesn’t make a mistake when I’m on my mobile (cellular) broadband internet. It’s spot on because the cell towers clearly indicate where I am to them.

Effects on PPC listings

For PPC users, my contacts have told me that it’s more important than ever to review your listings often and to ensure that you’re in the top of page results. Time will tell what this will do to the people who regularly show up in the sidebar sponsored section.

Using long tail keywords to improve results

One way I think that we might be able to get around some of these problems is to focus our efforts on long tail keywords. These longer search phrases tend to bring back world or countrywide result listings and often ignore the local settings.

There is 2 advantages to this: Long tail searches often indicate the searcher is in the buying zone and it seems to override the local search results and Google Places results.

Coping with change moving forward

I think we all understand by now that Google will continue to do its own thing to serve its users as it sees best. We have to accept that, roll with the punches and change to keep our results up in the rankings.

If you continue to keep an eye on things, produce quality content and understand your visitors and how they find you, your business will continue to grow and bring in sales.

No market or media is stagnant, everything changes every day!