Internet Marketing Services

Google rolled out the Instant functionality this week and that will come with changes for search marketers. I will start with a short explanation of the impact on PPC, then I will discuss about implications on web analytics and SEO.

One of the first questions raised with this launch was how are impressions  counted for AdWords and that has been answered pretty straight forward and quickly by Google: “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.” However it still remains a mystery how search volume is computed in the AdWords Keywords Suggestion Tool; those numbers were never explained by Google and now the new functionality will shade even more uncertainty on the subject.

Let’s see how Instant will affect your web analytics data and your search engine optimization efforts.

One of the ways marketers are choosing the right keywords to do search engine optimization for is by looking at the web analytics data and see how specific keywords are performing in search engines (visits, bounce rate and conversions among other metrics). Once they identified a perfect mix of metrics they rank keywords in order of ROI and then start the SEO process for the low hanging terms.

Before this update the query term was passed from Google to your analytics tool pretty forward, a simple http requests and your analytics tool could identify the query parameter q, in Google’s case. After the update the same parameter q is used to pass the data, only that this time the data will be screwed up:

Search query is passed by the q parameter

As you can see I typed “Vancouver SEO” only BUT the q parameter has automatically been update to “vancouver seo company”. This is bad.

Going further, after typing “vancouver seo” I clicked on our website (which was showing on positions #4 for this keyword) while capturing the http headers sent by Google and I had an ugly surprise:

q parameter passing the wrong search term to analytics tool

This is exactly what I feared the most: while I typed just “vancouver seo” the actual search term sent to Google Analytics was “vancouver seo company”, which means that the data we are going analyze will become garbage and therefore garbage in, garbage out.

This innovation from Google can lead to a higher number of visits coming from keywords that are not actually search by visitors and will make analysts and SEO guys think that those keywords are actually having a higher number of searches that in reality.

So, what can one do to fix this? At this time, I think it may be a good idea to take a snapshot of the existing rankings in search engine and the traffic values. Wait for some time (a couple of weeks) and then compare your traffic values with the snapshot. If you see keywords that get more visits without an improvement in the average position, you might be experiencing the “Google Instant effect” on SEO.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

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