NEW YORK & LONDON – Adam Bunn, head of search at London-based SEO and social marketing agency Greenlight, warns that some SEO campaigns may suffer a drop in traffic because of the new instant streaming search service Google is bringing out of Beta to all users in coming weeks. Bunn says, “When it comes to search engine optimization campaigns, some websites may now suffer a drop in traffic.”

The new feature, being introduced in the U.S. over the coming week, uses sophisticated algorithms and Google’s massive processing power to guess at what a searcher is seeking. It will fetch the search results word by word so the user never has to hit the search button. Bunn says this is a mightily impressive display of processing power on Google’s part.

Impressive processing power at work

Now, for every search you do Google may have to process anywhere from a couple to half a dozen different searches.  It has got to do this fast enough to keep up with your average typing speed.  This, on top of the fact that retrieving and sorting thousands of documents in a split second is already a modern marvel – admittedly one that few people spend much time thinking about.

But Bunn also says the service could potentially result in complications in rank checking software.

Greenlight’s Matthew Whiteway, director of campaign management, also says it could “Play havoc with an advertiser’s Google Quality Score.”

What are Google’s motives?

Whiteway questions Google’s motives for introducing the instant streaming search feature. He says that the “longtail” is becoming increasingly important in search queries, but Google can’t charge as much for longtail queries as for one or two keyword queries. That means, he says, “The more poeple search for longtail queries, the less money Google can charge the advertiser.”

According to Bunn, SEO campaigns including long multi-word keyword variants may see a drop in traffic for those keywords as a result of streaming search. Why?

Users may now find something to click on before completely typing their originally intended search term (depending, of course, on Google being able to provide accurate enough results at an earlier stage in the search).  Consequently, to be visible/ show up in search results, it may become more important for websites to optimise for the shorter, constituent parts of longer keywords.

“For example, if a website has optimised for and holds good rankings for ‘cheap car insurance UK’, that term may lose search traffic as UK users find that the shorter ‘cheap car insurance’ returns several relevant looking results, negating the need to finish their sentence.”

Google gives and Google takes away

Bunn points out that the constituent parts of longer keywords are often the types of generic keywords that are typically dominated by big brands and powerful sites with the cash to maintain rankings in an extremely competitive keyword space.

“So for smaller websites, this could well be a case of first Google giveth (the “May Day update”) then it taketh away (streaming search results).

Impact on paid search

In relation to paid search, the question is whether Google will count each refresh / change of the search engine results pages (SERPS) as an impression for the advertiser. Whilst some advertisers will believe increasing the number of impressions / eyeballs that see their ad will help improve brand awareness and brand recall, from a pay per click (PPC) marketing perspective, this increase in unwanted impressions could play havoc with an advertisers Google Quality Score.

Whiteway says Google’s motives for doing this must also be questioned. It has been suggested that as users become more and more internet savvy, the number of keywords used for each search query is increasing.

For example, users looking for low annual percentage rate (APR) credit cards historically may have simply searched for “credit cards” and then conducted the filtering process manually, whereas in recent years the “longtail” has become increasingly searched for and important, with search queries such as “credit cards with low APR” for example, growing in popularity.

Motive? Money

So why would the “Google financiers” not like this “longtail” trend? Money, says Whiteway.

“The CPC that Google can charge for ‘longtail’ keywords is significantly lower than that on more generic (one or two keyword search queries). Therefore the more people search for ‘longtail’ search queries, the less money Google can charge the advertiser.

With ‘streaming search’ therefore, Google is potentially ‘helping’ users find relevant results with less search term queries, thus increasing the number of clicks on generic terms and therefore increasing the CPC for the advertiser.”

At TechJournal South, we find it interesting that every technological change affecting the Internet now has implications that spread across businesses large and small as well as affecting individual users.

While Google’s new search could save users several seconds of search time, it could also, as Greenlight points out, affect the results affecting SEO on websites, ad campaigns and marketing efforts.

While the opinions expressed by Greenlight’s execs are theirs and not ours, we think the ramifications of changes such as this one deserve a broader look. — Allan Maurer

To contact TechJournal South Editor & Writer Allan Maurer: Allan at TechJournalSouth dot com.