How will Google Instant Previews affect your business?
As many of you will have noticed Google has recently added a new dimension to its search results by introducing Google Instant Previews. In essence this gives you a quick snapshot of the website before entering it and leaving the Google results page.
What affect will it have on a business that has already invested money in SEO?
In my opinion there are 3 main things that will definitely be impacted as a result of these snapshots and they are as follows:
Meta description
The meta description is the brief summary of a website which you will find on the Google results page. Up untilGoogle launched Instant Preview the meta description was the only way of judging how relevant a website was to your search before actually clicking through to the website itself. Although the meta description has no actual influence from an SEO point of view in terms of affecting the rank of a page, a well worded meta description has the potential to pull in a lot of traffic.
Traffic and Bounce rates
This leads me to my next point. Given the fact that you have a limited amount of space for your meta description many businesses can end up having very similar descriptions to that of their competitors. This is not entirely their fault because if you have more than one product you will be inclined to plug each one and a lot of the time you will see some companies basically listing their description as products that they sell. An example of this is the descriptions like ‘We specialise in Search Engine Optimisation, PPC, Online Marketing, Web Design, Graphic Design etc. So from a potential client’s point of view it can be hard to compare 2 different websites giving similar descriptions without actually visiting them both.
This may lead to either an increase or decrease in traffic depending on the relevant content that you have onyour home page via the snapshot. Some may see a decrease in traffic due to this. However they may also see a decrease in the number of bounce rates and it may actually give you a better indication of what your traffic actually is as opposed to people who land on your website looking for something else and instantly click back to the Google results page.
Bad Web Design will be punished!
There’s no getting away from this one. If you have a poorly designed website you are going to lose traffic with Google’s Instant Preview. The reason for this is that first impressions are everything! Regardless of how good the content may be on the website, if the design looks amateur or lazy it is going to put people off entering. In the past poorly designed websites will have gotten away with this due to relevant meta titles and descriptions so once a potential client has clicked through they would be more likely to give the bad design the benefit of the doubt as they are already on the webpage and continue to read the relevant data.
Now people are much more likely to scroll down the snapshots in a matter of seconds choosing to enter the website that looks professional and aesthetically pleasing as opposed to the website that looks as if it was put together by a child who just happened to be pushing buttons on the computer.
What’s the bottom line?
Not everybody will like these new developments Google has introduced, especially those with poorly designed websites as they have the potential to damage their existing traffic and sales figures but given the fact thatGoogle is the most used search engine on the internet by a country mile if you want to stay ahead in the game a general rule of thumb is if Google says ‘jump’, we all have no option but to reply ‘how high?’
Written by Barry Connolly
