A Preview of Google Instant Previews: Is it a Game Changer?

By Amy Africa

Google unveiled its newest search enhancement, Google Instant Previews (GIP), in November. Denoted by a small magnifying glass to the right of a search listing, GIP allows searchers to look at a mini version (also called a snippet) of a specific web page before they commit to clicking on it. Is this a game changer? Not exactly, but it certainly does make things interesting.

Users make decisions about your website in less than a second. Their entire decision is based on visual clues of the first view they see. (Consultants can debate whether users will scroll until the cows come home, but the fact is, while they'll scroll, 80 percent — technically about 76 percent — of their time is spent on the first view they see.)

GIP changes that dynamic. When users click on the magnifying glass, they're shown a complete page — not a view, but the entire page. This puts a lot of pressure on your page design. Just think of all the companies that use a full screen at the bottom of their web pages for search engine (SPAM) copy, for example. Not aesthetically pleasing in the least, but innocuous at best because people won't scroll that far, right? Well, now that big chunk of copy, without pictures, will be seen in your instant preview.

Will searchers actually use GIP? It's too early to say, but the folks at Google are hoping so. In fact, it's touting that users who are taking advantage of instant previews are 5 percent more satisfied with their search results. (That's not a great stat, by the way, as it hasn't been rolled out to all shoppers yet.) Plus, if you're searching from a smartphone, the whole preview thing isn't really applicable. With that said, if it does work, it should prevent pogosticking. (Search engine guru Danny Sullivan defines pogosticking as when "someone clicks from a search engine results page and then, if unsatisfied, clicks to select another result and so on.") Pogosticking is very big, especially with e-commerce sites.

Preparing for Previews
What can you do to prepare for GIP, just in case it really does work? Good question. Here are seven things you can easily do without breaking the bank:

1. Optimize your images. Yes, that sounds very 1998, but the truth is that most companies have gotten really careless about this in the past few years, especially with the onslaught of video. Unlike some of the other Google enhancements that won't load if your site is slow, GIP loads regardless of how fast your site is.

2. Preview your important pages, as well as the main pages of your competitors' sites, to see how you compare. When GIP was first introduced, one of the biggest apparel retailers went ballistic because it realized its preview pages were mostly white space, while its main competitor's pages looked full and packed with lots of good choices. You need to know what you're up against.

3. Do a relevant keyword check. One thing GIP is supposed to do (although early results are sketchy at best) is highlight keywords that users are searching for on the preview. This allows users to see how relevant the site is based on the highlighted words.

4. Focus on your visuals. Users see things in pictures; search engines see things in text. Look at your page as a whole and then determine if you're selling your story of that particular page in the pictures/visuals that you're showing. Many e-tailers use a big carousel at the top of the page and then lots of links without pictures on the second view. This becomes increasingly poor from a user's viewing perspective when the page is seen as a whole. Ensure that all of your pages have at least one visual on them. If they don't, users technically won't "see" it, thus making the likelihood of them clicking on it minimal at best.

5. Ditch Flash. One of the biggest challenges companies are currently facing in regard to GIP is the "this content requires Flash warning" message. When consumers get a blank box that says "to view this content you must have Javascript enabled and you need the latest version of Flash installed," it all but forces them to look to the next search result on the list.

6. Make your headlines look like headlines (and if you don't have headlines, implement them — at least on your most important pages). From a usability perspective, one of the most fascinating things about GIP is that it actually puts dependence on copy. Need an example of why this is important? Search for "women's dresses" on Google. All the previews will showcase about a dozen thumbnails of clothing (sadly, many of which aren't dresses). Most of them won't have a good headline that talks about the dress. Sounds too trivial to be important? It's not. From a user perspective, the word "connect" is one of the key influences on bounce rate and user session.

7. Look carefully at your colors, especially the ones you use in your backgrounds and carousels. Why? There are some colors that just don't compress well. Purple, for example, never looks good in  highly compressed images. With that said, background color will make a difference in your instant previews. Overstock.com doesn't use much color at all on its site and it really shows in its previews; they're very lackluster in comparison to some of  its competitors.

Finally, if you don't want Google to allow instant previews of your web pages, opt out using a no-snippets metatag.