It’s called Google Instant Previews and it’s a way for searchers to preview an image of your site before clicking through the SERPs. What does this mean for SEOs? It means that page layout and design can now play a roll in getting the click through.
Let’s take a look at how this works by searching “sweet potato recipes” in Google.
In the SERPs, you should see a magnifying glass icon next to each title. If not, turn Google Instant on. Once the icon is clicked it activates Instant Previews for the duration of that keyword search, even when you move on to page 2, 3, etc. Just scroll down the results and the Preview image for that specific site will appear in a pop out window to the right.
Check out the #4 ranking site in the image below: Southern Food at About.com. The title sounds good, but before we click through, let’s take a look at the actual page.
Now that I’ve seen a preview of the site I’ve made a definite decision about the click through: not going to happen. Why? Like most searchers, I had an idea of what I wanted before the search started. In this case, I’m looking for a list of recipes with pictures. This site only has two pictures and no descriptions for those recipe links.
Below is another example (from page two) of a site that caught my attention with the title, but lost me at the Preview. Why? I’m not a chef. I can’t read a list of ingredients and imagine what the dish will look like–like most searches, I need pictures.
The Food Network Preview has exactly what I’m looking for: an organized list of recipes with user reviews and pictures. Click.
How Old are Preview Images?
There are a couple of ways Google gets your Preview image. First, images are gathered when Google crawls your site. That means an image could be 5 days to 2 weeks old. User-agents for showing images on the fly like Google Web Preview (Mozilla/5.0 (en-us) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13), are also being used. Check your referrer log for the agent name and that will tell you if your image taken on the fly, or grabbed when the site is crawled.
Snapshot of Relevant Text
Another feature of the Preview image is that it highlights where the searched phrase appears on your page. Text is outlined it in orange and added in larger text to a call out box as shown below.
Multiple keyphrase mentions in the text result in multiple text boxes. From the sample searches I’ve done, only body text is appearing in the call out boxes.
Optimizing for Google Instant Previews
Here are a few ways you can make sure Previews works for and not against your site.
1. Run a search for your most important keyphrases (make sure Google Instant is on).
2. In the SERPs, click the magnifying glass icon and scan all page previews on the page.
3. How does your image measure up? Are there more appealing images that may take clicks from you?
4. Are your Preview images void of call out boxes? That means you’re not using the keyphrase in the body text. Also, make sure that your page content matches the meta title and description.
5. You can opt out of the Preview image by adding the following meta tag to the <head> section of your site:
Instead of an image, users will see a “Preview Not Available” message.
The addition of Instant Previews makes absolute sense. It’s an great add-on to Instant. As an SEO; however, you need to take a hard look at your page design and ask: What will a prospect think when they see your page preview? Does the page image continue the conversation you’ve started with the title and description? Does it give the searcher what they’re looking for? Or it is lacking in some way?
Dave says
Article is interesting, but it sure would be more useful if the pictures were visible… Thanks
klimatyzacja says
Very interesting
Sean Brady says
This is awesome! I love this feature they incorporated into their site. I am able to view pages to make sure they aren’t crap, before visiting them! Terrific!