Google Instant Search & SEO – You Better Rank #1

I’ve noticed that a lot of searches are going to default to ‘plural’ keywords instead of singular (e.g. ‘Marketing Materials’ will pre-fill before ‘Marketing Material’) This is unfortunate for people who were targeting singular keywords.

http://www.otherlandtoys.co.uk/images/horn800.jpg

dont see how this is adding value to the user or to their adwords advertisers…guessing a lot more bounces and searches as a result of this change.

Yup..even with Instand on, we’re still #1 for our town…

http://www.kkti.com/kkti_instant-results.jpg

🙂

Jim

Hey Brian, I am seeing just as many singular queries as default.

Hey Andrew… yeah, I should have been more specific. I’m seeing one or the other, but not both. Whereas before a singular term might get more traffic than the plural version (or vice-versa) but both will still get SOME, with Instant, it seems that whichever Google decides is its preference will trounce the other. Thoughts?

If that is the case they may have designed it this way to insure greater query diversity. That said I just queried “doctor” and got both plural and singular in the suggest box.

Right… but the suggest box isn’t what I think will change the volume of searches between the two terms, it is the results that Instant displays.

Doctors isn’t a good example because for me Instant shows ‘Doctor Who’ as the results after I type ‘doc’. But, lets say you SEO for someone who sold kitchen countertops. From what I’m seeing with Instant, you’d definitely want to optimize for “new kitchen countertops” plural, not singular.

The reason I’m invested in this topic is because I had a client with a top ranking for a singular keyword phrase that, I suspect (but don’t know for sure), will lose a lot of the traffic it was generating because Google has chosen the plural version.

Sean Odom has a great article on this published by Local News Day at: http://www.localnewsday.com/0910.Google-Instant-SEO.html

You are on to the right idea, but I think this fills in the blanks and put the reasoning behind it.

Common guys, believe or not – the algorithm has changed now. Not by a huge percentage but it will impact results. The reason we are not experiencing any differences in ranking is that Google instant is still using old data and references.
Once, the new Instant bot crawls all the Web in 2 months or so, look at the difference in Google ranks for all the old sites and pages. U will then see the reality.
Believe me, I have a insight into Google’s Team. Don’t believe, i will be posting a article (a proof) of how google instant alogirthm has a update (or a change) at http://www.howgoogleranks.com

thanks! great post!

Very true thoughts! Loving this post!

i have manged to keep #1 spot 🙂