A few days ago I was searching a few odds and ends in Google and I noticed a little blue triangular arrow next to the top listing, it confused the hell out of me, the next minute I ended up on the site itself. What just happened? I stumbled upon the latest Google SERP change – the keyboard controls.
Try it yourself; search something with instant on, you’ll notice no little arrow, hit enter once – voila you’ve got a pointer, now navigate up and down with your keyboard arrows, hit enter again and you’re navigated towards the site in question. Instant, mouseless navigation: very very fast and super slick.
Interestingly, centrally placed AdWords results are keyboard navigable as the 1st results, if you tap your way to the bottom of the SERP you’ll flick up to the right hand AdWords, this has significant implications, see below.
So what does this mean for us? Here are a few things to keep in mind…
Organic
1. The long tail will be reduced slightly and the more common keywords are, unfortunately, being force fed to searchers.
2. Top results are going to get even more traffic. Good organic campaigns are going to be more and more important.
3. Pay lots of attention to the design of your SERP listings, people are going to be searching a lot faster and they’ll be scanning the SERPs at high speed, your listing will only get clicks if it’s appealing instantly and well-targeted.
AdWords
1. Adjust the way you plan your campaigns: keeping in mind that these results spew as you start typing, you might do well to set up some base campaigns that target the primitive versions of your searches, the short tailed stuff, unfortunately it’ll be expensive, but play with it a bit and you might get something out of it.
2. Change the way you interpret your CTR. From the horses mouth “With Google Instant, an impression is counted if a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds.
It's possible that this feature may increase or decrease your overall impression levels. However, Google Instant may ultimately improve the quality of your clicks since it helps users type queries that more directly connect them with the answers they need.”
When does this come to South Africa? Supposedly it’s being rolled out across all the Google domains, so get prepared. If Google notices your connection speed is too low it disables the feature automatically. Take a look at Google’s page on [instant search] http://www.google.com/instant/
