Google has continued rolling out Google Instant with Australia launching on Friday and no doubt New Zealand to be soon after. Although it is still new with the feature only available via the Google homepage and to logged-in users, Google says it is already seeing changes in user behaviour. Content and good usability will continue to be important factors, and while there is little point looking at tricks such as optimising for just the first few letters of words or misspellings, it is worthwhile considering how people using Google Instant might change their behaviour.

The goal of Google Instant is to save time. This fits well with the natural inclination of people on the internet to be a little lazy. So how then might people adapt to exploit Google Instant by typing fewer characters? The obvious answer is that people will type the topic of their keyword search first in the hope that they don’t need to type lots of descriptors as well.

As an example, the Google Adwords tool used to show that people searching for accommodation would search in fairly equal numbers a certain search phrase both ways. For example: ‘Rotorua accommodation’ and ‘accommodation Rotorua’. With Google Instant this might change. Why would you type ‘accommodation Rotorua’ when you can type ‘Rotorua acco’ and Google will give you the results you are looking for. It may only save you from typing nine letters (or 45% of the entire search phrase) but it is these minor time savings that Google has invested so much in and believes will cumulatively save users around the world millions of hours.

If user behaviour did intuitively change this way to save time, then this could mean that the online market could effectively focus on fewer keywords that were naturally more efficient for search engine marketing. This could mean less focus on long-tail keywords and also more competition for fewer ‘high performance’ keywords for each niche or market.

At this point it is hypothetical, but Google will continue to track behaviour and online tools will be able to give data in a matter of months and weeks showing how keyword usage is changing. If Google Instant does change user behaviour then all businesses with a web focus will need to review and reconsider their search engine optimisation and what search phrases they are optimised for. Some phrases may become redundant. Other search phrases may attract more demand, but with that will come more competition.