Google’s big announcement yesterday, as predicted by many, was the release of Google Instant, its next evolution following on from Google Caffeine which was released earlier this year.

So what is it?

Surfers will have by now become used to Google’s ‘predicted search’ function where your search query is predicted as you type. Google Instant takes this one step further with the use of AJAX, by instantly updating the search result for your query as you type, as shown in the examples below:

CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE

So what does this mean for SEO and PPC campaigns?

Well despite some ‘panic’ from those looking for excuses as to why campaigns aren’t successful, some SEO experts with a more considered approach rightly point out that doing the basics correctly is as paramount as ever.

Although it is already highly important to generate that all important click through, well written page titles and meta descriptions, and the need for more creative and well written titles may increase as Google Instant may reduce the amount of time you have to capture the users attention, especially in the case of more generic terms.

For users of Google AdWords these changes may be felt more immediately, especially in the case of impressions. Big G tells us that from now on impressions generated using Google Instant only count when a user carries out some form of action such as: Pressing the Enter key, clicking anywhere on the page or viewing a SERP for more than 3 seconds after typing.

It is also worth pointing out that Google Instant is only available for users with the very latest browsers. More importantly, for those not using Google.com, they must be signed in with a Google account to utilise this new feature. Whether this is rolled out to users not signed into Google in the future is currently unknown.

So what could this mean for AdWords and SEO campaign managers? Well, like Google we won’t truly know the effect it will have on campaigns until enough time has elapsed to truly judge the result, and it would unsuitable to comment beforehand. But, we will speedily follow this up with a further blog post once we can judge the results.

Tags: Google Caffeine, Google Instant, SEO, SEO experts

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 11:46 am and is filed under Industry Comment, Motionlab Marketing, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.