Implications of Google’s New Instant Preview Tool

Significant new feature will change clickthrough rates

This week, Google recently launched an update to its search results page (SERP) which allows visitors to preview a website within the results page before making the decision to click-through.

The update currently only affects Natural Search listings but it is a useful tool for Google users and reports from Google themselves are saying searchers are 5% more likely to be satisfied with the result they click after using the preview.

So our recommendation is to check out what happens when you press the magnifying button next to your listing for your brand search.

Here is an example from the excellent analysis by Simple Usability on the Impact of Google Instant Previews on user behaviour - a must read for all online marketers.

According to Google,  if you get this right you could expect up to a 5% drop in bounce rate, something to think about!  I think this is a great addition to Google for a number of reasons but most of all it will force people who a great at Search Engine Optimisation to start to consider design & journeys. Something often overlooked when completing on-page optimisation etc.

Some tips from the Google Webmaster blog on how you should be checking & updating your site to get the best out of this tool:

• 1. Keep your pages clearly laid out and structured, with a minimum of distractions or extraneous content. This is always good advice, since it improves the experience for visitors, and the simplicity and clarity of your site will be apparent via Instant Previews.
• 2. Try to avoid interstitial pages, ad pop-ups, or other elements that interfere with your content. In some cases, these distracting elements may be picked up in the preview of your page, making the screenshots less attractive.
• 3. Many pages have their previews generated as part of our regular crawl process. Occasionally, we will generate screenshots on the fly when a user needs it, and in these situations we will retrieve information from web pages using a new "Google Web Preview" user-agent.
• 4. Instant Previews does not change our search algorithm or ranking in any way. It's the same results, in the same order. There is also no change to how clicks are tracked. If a user clicks on the title of a result and visits your site, it will count as a normal click, regardless of whether the result was previewed. Previewing a result, however, doesn't count as a click by itself.
• 5. Currently, adding the nosnippet meta tagto your pages will cause them to not show a text snippet in our results. Since Instant Previews serves a similar purpose to snippets, pages with the nosnippet tag will also not show previews. However, we encourage you to think carefully about opting out of Instant Previews. Just like regular snippets, previews tend to be helpful to users"€”in our studies, results which were previewed were more than four times as likely to be clicked on. URLs that have been disallowed in the robots.txt file will also not show Instant Previews.
• 6. Currently, some videos or Flash content in previews appear as a "puzzle piece" icon or a black square. We're working on rendering these rich content types accurately.

Recommended link: Google Webmaster Tools - Site Preview Tool