Whilst it hasn’t been long since Google rolled fully rolled out its Continuous Scroll, it begs the question in terms of SEO, ‘Now that the coveted page 1 is effectively infinite what is the Google Continuous Scroll SEO impact?’
If you are anything like the skeptic I am you will no doubt be thinking about how the bar has suddenly gotten even lower with an effectively infinite 1st page of Google search results. More so, that any SEO spammers will be loving the technicality of giving you a First Page Google result, even if it is in position 1008, after 5 mins of continuous scrolling.
But aside from being a benefit to dodgy SEO ‘consultants’ and their spam emails what are the likely impacts on those of us who care about getting and keeping our search engine results?
Lets us explore Google Continuous Scroll and SEO.
What is Google Continuous Scroll?
Like the name suggests, rather than paginated results sorting and ranking the Google search results Google has done away with the pagination so that when you reach the bottom of the first set of results, you wont need to click to page 2 as the results just infinitely scroll.
If you scroll too fast for your browser you will see a ‘results loading’ icon at the bottom of what would have been the old page one, but if you scroll slow enough for your browser to pre-load the next set of search results, the continuous scroll is mostly seamless.
Why did Google implement Continuous Scroll?
Whilst Page 1 of the Google search results was the Holly Grail when it came to SEO and selling SEO services, Google looked at the Click-Through-Ratio (CTR) of the websites in its search result pages and found that 86.3% of the first ten organic SEO results got the clicks and only 13.7% would go past the website ranked in position 11 on the traditional Google Page 1. If your settings were set to show pages of 10 results that is.
You will find many skeptics effectively saying that Google only introduced the ability for continuous scrolling so that it could serve more ads, which are more prominent and feel less constrained in a continuous scroll than if they were only at the top and bottom of each actual page.
You will find many more skeptics arguing that continuous scrolling also makes it harder to rank organic results based on the merit of relevance after what would have been the old first page but then again, the counter argument is that now that the internet is so vast, does the one page of just ten results give us enough choice to find the most relevant result for our search?
It is certainly a valid argument that over the years Google has tinkered with Search so much that it has undermined its own goal to rank better, the websites that best answered the search intent of the original search query.
One way to counter that tinkering, now that the traditional Google first page is diluted in terms of quality, would be to encourage people to look beyond the first ten results.
What are the impacts of Continuous Scroll on SEO?
By Google changing things up, as it frequently does, a new challenge has certainly been introduced but also a new opportunity.
To those who previously ranked well enough to be on Page 1 and in the top 5 results, life will go on relatively unchanged.
Those who previously ranked well enough to get onto bottom of Page 1 or the top of Page 2 will arguably see the biggest shift to the clicks.
It was just natural search behaviour to focus your attention on ten results at a time so scrolling continuously is the biggest threat to those people who were positioned on the old borders of page one and two so like those on the old page two and page three, they will need to try and improve their landing pages and meta descriptions to stand out better.
Continuous Scroll and SEO Opportunity
If you wanted to hide a body outside of the world imagined in Sci-fi film Looper, you could do a lot worse than Page 2 of Google.
Such was the prominence and lure of Page 1 near 90% of people effectively wrote off anything on page two or lower, but Continuous Scroll has changed this and now that the lines between the pages are removed it opens up those previously unseen results pages to new eyes.
This is clearly an opportunity to those who didn’t rank well enough for Page 1 and there are many magnitudes more of people in that boat than those on page one.
How Best to Maximise Continuous Scroll and SEO
Although getting to the first page of Google’s search results is still the Holly Grail of Search and SEO, being on page two or three will now have more benefits and opportunities than it once did, thanks to endless scrolling.
So make sure you maximise this opportunity.
People who rank in positions 11-30 need to make sure that they are optimising their landing page titles and meta descriptions and using features like schema markup to make their content stand out more.
By standing out you make your search result more engaging and therefore clickable in the new way SERPs is working.
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