Joel Pinkham

Google Instant Preview

I’ll assume you know what I’m talking about with this new feature from Google – and if you haven’t then read more about it on SearchEngineLand.

Funnily enough, 2 years ago I wrote about a new visual search engine where I mentioned all of these points – and if you’re curious you can read that here.

5 Ways Google Instant Preview will Impact SEO & Your Website

1. Lower Bounce Rate – visitors will be pre-qualified and know what to expect. This is bad for publishers who make money on a CPM basis who just want as many impressions as possible.
2. Higher or Lower Click Through Rate – depending on your design, your organic CTR will change.  And if you’re site looks poor, it might turn users off, but if it matches their expectations you’re going to get more visits.
3. Demise of Spam Sites – How often do you click through to a search result and get some average content that is unreadable because of the number of AdSense blocks on it? If you knew that’s what the site was, you wouldn’t click through. Based on this theory, their CTR will go down which may impact…
4. Lower ranking for poorly designed sites – I’m speculating a lot here, Bing have admitted to using CTR in their ranking algorithm so I can only assume the big G does as well. If you get a lower CTR, then by this theory your ranking will go down. It gives Google great insight into the quality of a website, preview -> click ratio shows a stronger picture about how users perceive your site.
5. Prominence of on-page keyword usage will become more common – To match searcher expectations and make your page seem more relevant, you’re going to need to make your keywords visible on the design. Either with a large title or even within a graphic.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 10th, 2010 at 9:57 am and is filed under Search Marketing. 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.