I’ve mentioned some of the implications of Google Instant search results in the last couple of articles, but one of the most intriguing possibilities comes in trying to appear for a “partial match”, either in the organic results or – more likely – through Google AdWords.
Let me explain. Remember my example of a search for “brushless motor”? To remind yourself, try it: go to Google and type in the word “brushless” and watch the results flash past. (Reminder: You need to be signed in to a Google Account at the moment, and need to use an up-to-date browser – nothing older than Internet Explorer 8).
Now, the results pages which show as you hit “b”, “r”, “u”, etc may be nothing to do with brushless motors, but you do see them as they flash past, and on many of them, the search term which is showing might not be nearly as competitive for Google AdWords. Once you’ve typed in “brushl”, the results are for “brushless motor”, and as you can see, there are a lot of AdWords advertisers around this term. I expect the top advert is paying well in excess of £1/click. But before you got as far as typing in “brushl”, you’d typed in “bru”, “brus” and “brush”, any (or all) of which might have been uncompetitive for adverts, and which might have allowed you to buy the top AdWords spot for pennies.
What’s more, for some reason, although the eye tends to skip over ads once you’ve settled on a page to have a more considered view, when you’re flicking through, those AdWords ads at the top really stand out. I sense a big opportunity coming up, which we’ll be working on hard for our AdWords clients over the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, Charlie Brooker has declared war on Google for trying to make his brain explode.
So let’s say your advert already appears once ‘brushl’ is reached; so you bid on ‘brush’ to gain advantage. Then you notice competitors have caught up and the bid price goes up, so you play for ‘brus’. Before you know it you’re competing again and ‘brus’ becomes ‘bru’…..sooner or later we will all be bidding on 26 keywords from A to Z…..perhaps not quite but it is interesting stuff.
(Retailers could jump straight in with A to Z now as many single letters return shops).