At EO, we're big believers that people who are telling you to not stress out and make drastic changes to your SEO strategy (or for that matter your AdWords strategy) until the effects of Instant have had some time to take hold and be properly analyzed are correct. That said, as you're evaluating changes in your traffic pattern since the launch of Instant, you may want to keep in mind what to look for. There is, of course, a long list. But here are three things  you'll want to keep an eye on or consider keeping pace with.

 

Long Search Strings: Google has been clear. Results are based on a projected query, so don't start thinking that you need to optimize on a one word basis. The example from Google's own blog is great here. If you sell flowers, don't go into a scramble to optimize your site for the unrelated word "flow." Queries will be filled in based on the anticipated result of flowers as users type. "Flow" won't get you very far! However, what if your best keyword phrases are extremely long? For example, your best performing keyword phrase is an exact match query to "Flowers from the tropics of South America?" Well, then you most likely have a problem, because once you're through the first world "flowers", users will already be seeing results that may distract them from their original highly targeted search phrase. They may never get to the point where they enter "Flowers from the tropics of South America." So you do need to start looking for shorter, more effective SEO phrases.

 

Top 10 May Not Be Good Enough Any More: If you've been happily settling for lower positions on the page for your key search terms because you don't want to spend the SEO budget and resources for top positions, you may want to re-evaluate that strategy. Most experts assume that if users widely adopt the speed of instant, lower placements will become less effective. That's remains to be seen, frankly. And to be perfectly honest Instant will only reduce time on the page if Google's algorithm is really finding the very best search results for key words. We have to admit, however, that it's a possibility and you may want to consider preparing for the event that you need to be more concerned with upper page and even top three placements on your best words.

 

It may not be a bad strategy to look for less searched but related searches to optimize for. You'll not only have an easier time getting noticed with Instant running, you'll also get the benefit of having a chance to leapfrog onto the front page at Bing, where they drop off the second half of the top results in favor of "related search results."

 

Adwords: Adwords has been hard enough for anybody without a budget to just come in and bid up to a top spot lately. Lead aggregators have cut into everybody's ability to make small business Adwords accounts successful. While Instant won't lead to a miscount in your Adwords impressions, it will reduce users' time looking at results. That, of course, means that you have less time to make your ad pop, which means that higher placement (and, of course, larger bids) will become more important to success factors.

 

That said, there's an argument that prices may trend down for Adwords as companies move their resources into doubling down on organic search in order to get into the now coveted top positions. You may find it easier to get that Adwords spot that you need!

 

Don't think that Instant is going to be all bad. If you do good SEO, by which we mean create good content and good link structures, users will find you on the internet. Instant, in many ways, makes it harder to game the system because users will move through results faster. If you're gaining SEO position but short on quality, it's going to come back to haunt you with Instant. We like that.