Last week, we talked about Google Instant, and our belief that Google Instant is designed to increase Google’s revenues by guiding searchers and online marketers away from “long-tail” search terms and toward more popular, high-cost search terms.

It’s not only rich Google who will get richer in this scenario. Wealthy companies with big advertising budgets will be able to afford to compete for the high-volume search terms, edging out the little guys who can’t.

Except…

We don’t think Google Instant will significantly inflate the price of local search terms.

In fact, we believe that Google Instant will probably push more people toward local results, and that’s great news for contracting companies.

Searchers these days are pretty smart. If they want a plumber in their local area, chances are they won’t just type in “plumber”. They’re going to type in “plumber” plus the town or county or neighborhood they live in, or their zip code. For naïve searchers who don’t specify a location on their own, Google offers two important prompts to guide them to local results. The Local Search map appears, providing searchers with a visual guide for choosing a plumber close to them. Plus, now Google Instant will suggest search phrases that include the town where the searcher lives, i.e. “plumber burlington vt”.

Of course, this feature of Google Instant makes it important for local businesses to be competitive for the search terms that are most popular in their local area. But in most markets (and certainly in non-metropolitan markets) we don’t believe that Google Instant will lead to a huge increase in competitiveness and pricing for local search terms.

Here’s why:

• There are only a few reasonable ways for people to search for services in their local area: by town, county, region, zip code.
• There is a natural limitation on the number of people who want a given service in a given region, and this in turn leads to a natural limitation on the number of people who offer that service. Google Instant is not going to increase the number of people with broken pipes in Burlington, and it’s not going to increase the number of companies that offer plumbing services.

That means that in most local markets, the search terms that are being used, and the number of companies competing for them, are already established. Google Instant won’t do much to change them, which means that the price for local search terms won’t increase.

The only thing that Google Instant will change is the number of people who search for local results.

All this makes us at iMarket extremely confident that iMarket’s unique “town by town” strategy is the perfect way to take on the new challenges and opportunities offered by Google Instant. Our core philosophy has always been to make our clients’ online marketing as cost-effective as possible by bypassing the big-ticket search terms and focus on the local search terms that bring real leads to contracting businesses. Google Instant is going to funnel more people to the local search terms iMarket’s system is designed to dominate.

Yes, Google Instant does make Google richer. But if you’re a strong competitor for local search terms, it can make you richer, too.