Ever since Google announced the launch of Google Instant on September 8th the search marketing community has been alight with rumour, speculation and in some cases down right doomongering on the future of search engine optimisation.

While it’s still very early days the dust has started to settle and we’re starting to get a picture of what to expect in the months to come.

SEO has, and always will have a negative reputation in the eyes of some, and to an extent it is understandable. If you own a blog or website that allows public posting you’ll no doubt have experienced the vast waves of automated spam comments that need to be moderated & removed, so it’s completely understandable that some have a serious misconception about what SEO is and how it should be practiced.

It’s because of these misconceptions that some people are all too happy to jump on the ‘SEO is dead!’ bandwagon, and the launch of Google Instant is yet another opportunity to do so.

SEO is, and always has been about making a website as accessible to users and search engines as possible while providing content of value that users wish to share (originally through back-linking but increasingly through social networks). Note in this definition of SEO the absence of buying links, spamming blogs & defrauding the search engines.

So is SEO dead?

In short the answer is no. As long as search engines exist and decide how to rank pages based on the quality of content & popularity among other websites there will always be a place for SEO. However (and it’s a big one) it will make many of the existing SEO techniques redundant & the competitiveness of head term keywords increase.
Long-Tail & Head Terms

The long-tail is likely to shrink as people change their search behaviour – if you originally intended to search for “Music Tickets in 2011” (long-tail) but see the results you need after “Music Tic…” then the websites who rank well for your original search query will miss out on your visit, while sites ranking well for “Music Tickets” (head term) are likely to see traffic increase.
Note: if the same website ranks in position 1 for both of those searches they’ll see their long-tail shrink without the loss of traffic.

Importance of Rank

We’re not the first to suggest that people will be less likely to visit the second page of results when Google Instant launches to all, but it will be equally as likely that people will no longer bother to scroll the browser window down beyond the results they can see:

Even if I have no intention of clicking on a PPC advert I’m presented with three relevant organic results – if none of these are what I’m after I simply need to continue typing until I get what I want – why bother moving my hand to the mouse and scroll?

So what does this mean?

Websites that rank in position 4-10 (certainly 6-10) are probably going to see their traffic levels drop, even on head terms like ‘Holiday Spain’ that would previously have been very lucrative.

Conversely, the top 3 ranking websites will see traffic increase, giving them an even greater share of the market. This will put pressure on websites to either increase their SEO activity or compete through PPC (which is of course lucrative for Google).

Monitoring the Effect

Firstly it’s important to note that the way pages are crawled and ranked has not been changed with the introduction of Google Instant; if you ranked 1st for a keyword before you should still rank 1st.

It’s too early to say with any certainty how Instant is going to affect website traffic, largely because it’s still only available to a relatively small number of users, especially outside of the US. The main driving force of any change is going to be how people’s search behaviour evolves and only once this happens will we truly know the impact Google Instant will have had.

However if you’re a website owner concerned about how Google Instant will affect your traffic I would recommend keeping an eye on traffic levels as a whole and any geographical regions where Google Instant is available without being logged in (US).

Are keywords that were previously driving steady volumes now changing? If you notice a dramatic drop (or increase) then it may be as a result of Instant.

Have you notice any strange trends sine Google Instant? Has your traffic been affected? Leave a comment and let us know.