Initial thoughts on Ajax Based Search Results from Google Instant

After reading a few articles floating around about the logo on Google and the anticipation of Google releasing real-time — ‘AJAXed‘ — search results I thought I would put some initial thoughts together on what this might mean for SEO and driving natural search traffic to websites.

In brief, AJAX search results would mean that as Google users start to type their search query the entire search results page would update with websites similar or what Google thinks are similar to the type characters. This is similar to the way Google currently users a drop down key phrase suggestion box to display similar key phrases to the current characters in the search box.

Since the beginning of SEO — but more in the last few years —one of the big areas to gain search traffic was by the optimisation of long tail key phrases. This was due to a number of factors.

- As pointed out by SEOmoz and other sites the conversion improvement for key phrases with over 3 words
- The fact that the competition for short phrases (1 or 2 words) was owned by bigger websites with marketing budgets much larger then the majority of small / niche online retailers.
- And of course a large percentage of search traffic consists of long tail key phrases or phrases which have never been searched for before.

So if Google does implement AJAX search results this would mean that as people type in a phrase they will be presented with sites (most likely the best performing for short key phrases).

Thinking about how this will affect results might be that SEO now needs to look at the first word of a key phrase as the target instead of the entire phrase which creates a lot more competition for these top phrases.

AJAX will also mean that people will not scroll as much, instead they will continue to type until they find what they are looking for in the top positions (before the page fold). This will help websites with targeted content but seriously affect Click through rates on any site which is below the fold. For some sites this could be a huge loss as even search position 9 and 10 gain some traffic and from a key phrase analysis point of view lower positioned sites for particular phrases is a great way to found out if a phrases received a lot of searches.

On the upside if you are searching for a phrase it will be possible to continue typing until the correct site appears in the top 3 positions so you don’t have to scroll through the first 3 pages to find the result you desire.

Analytics should also be interesting as people start to find the site they are looking for (or what Google thinks they are looking for) within the first three characters, so for current key phrases like ‘Women’s Clothing’ sites might start to receive traffic for ‘Wom’. This will affect the way conversion optimisation is carried out and ensuring that users are provided with the best product / content for their search phrase. Since Google has always highlighted how they wish to provide their users with the best experience possible by providing accurate search results I am not sure how AJAX results are going to ensure that for any phrase, except long tail.

So how should SEO move forward — should sites start to optimise for the first 3–5 characters of targeted phrases, should we forget long tail, or will PPC get saturated with all the top phrases as it may be near impossible to appear above huge sites? Again this feels like Google want more people to use PPC and that smaller websites or niche site will have a huge challenge to gain natural search traffic.

—Tim