I’ve spent the last hour or so playing with Google’s new instant search feature and wanted to share some initial thoughts on what this could mean for communications professionals and the clients we advise.
On a personal level I like it. Finding that deliberately pausing while typing, say after the first two letters, drove a better set of search results is great. I also found that across about 50 test queries I did, I didn’t finish typing one full query. So, it works as designed to speed search.
From a professional standpoint I see a discrete challenge to overcome and an intriguing new opportunity to nuance our communications strategies.
The predictive nature of instant search dynamically changes what the user is typing as a search string. As we see the potential predications populate, we may tweak or change what we are about to type. This may well lead to a narrowing of the range and diversity of common search terms. It’s a bit like if I was to ask you your favorite color – I would get a wide palette of responses. If I asked instead, ‘do you prefer red, green or orange?’ I would get just three sets of answers. Although not as dramatic as that example, any guided search such as Google Instant, would tend to narrow the range of questions asked.
The challenge is that any narrowing of the spread of search queries will lead to more competition to rank well against those now more popular search terms. As communications professionals it means we have to re-double our efforts to ensure that search strategy is closely coupled to the content creation process – this runs through basic web content to YouTube videos, tweets and beyond. Every piece of content counts and needs to be aligned to the content/search strategy.
Beyond that, I see an intriguing idea emerging. Rather than responding to search trends with content, why not use content to create search trends. And with Google Instant, such new trends may rise more quickly and become self-sustaining more easily with the built-in feedback loops.
For us as an industry, this means creating campaigns around terms and phrases that we want people to search for. In essence, a little like the pharmaceutical companies always saying “ask your Doctor about…”, we want to indirectly get users to “ask Google about…”.
To make this happen, now more than ever before, we need to create a strategy across marketing, communications, digital, search and even customer service – but the payoff once such phrases become self-sustaining is potentially large.
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