What is Google Instant?

Last week, Google released Google Instant. You have to adapt to this change if you don't want to lose many website visitors.
What is Google Instant?

Google Instant is Google's new way to display search results while the user is typing the query. Google tries to complete the query during the input.
For example, when you enter "bike h" then Google will display the results for the keyword "bike helmets" because Google thinks that this is the most likely query.
Google Instant will not display the search results for the keywords "bike h", which are totally different. If you want to get the results for "bike h", you have to click the search button.

What does this mean for your website?

It's very likely that the search behavior of searchers will change. Until now, people had to think to refine their queries. With Google Instant, surfers get suggestions while they are typing and many of them will select one of the suggestions.
That means that some search terms will get many more searches than before while the number of searches for other terms will decrease.

How to get more visitors with Google Instant search

Google Instant automatically completes the search query of a user while typing. Google uses the keywords of Google Suggest to complete the query.
That means that the keywords that Google Suggest uses will get even more traffic than before. For that reason, your web pages should be optimized for the keywords that Google suggests.
To find the keywords that Google Suggest offers for your keywords, do the following:
1. Download IBP and open the keyword manager in IBP.
2. Select "Google Suggest" as the source for keyword suggestions and enter your main keywords.
IBP will return the Google Suggest keyword suggestions. Repeat this with your main keywords to get a comprehensive list. The number of searches for the keywords does not matter because Google Instant counts this differently.
After collecting your keyword list, optimize as many different pages of your website for as many of these keywords as possible. IBP's Top 10 Optimizer will tell you how to change your web pages so that Google will display them in the top 10 results for these keywords.
This is a very important step! If you don't optimize your web pages for these keywords, you'll miss a lot of traffic!
Do not change pages for which you already have high rankings. Optimize new pages of your website for new keywords. The more pages of your website you optimize, the better.

Google Instant is not a new ranking algorithm. It is just a new way in which Google displays the search results. Some keywords will now get fewer impressions, some keywords will get more impressions.