What Is the Potential Impact of Google’s New “Refine This Search” and “Broaden This Search” Features?

Google announced yesterday that they are rolling out the “refine this search” and “broaden this search” features to English based users, according to Search Engine Land. 

What impact could this have on your search performance?

One thing is very clear – the importance of long tail keywords will only continue to grow. Gone are the days of targeting high volume, high traffic generic keywords. Unless you have the biggest site in your niche, it is already incredibly difficult to rank for these terms, meanwhile the value of such rankings continues to decline. 

Users today are using more and more sophisticated search queries, aided in part by an evolving Google SERP that has never been better at delivering the results they are looking for. Even when they search for a generic term, Google is increasingly serving more targeted results that match the search intent of the user. The People Also Ask and Featured Snippet sections caused a massive change in the search habits of users, and these new rich results are likely to continue this trend.

To continue to drive performance in this environment, requires content depth that matches the search intent of your users. Gone are the days where an auto parts store could simply try to rank for the search term “wheel bearing” – only one of the organic results for this query is transactional. Every other result is informational, because Google knows the person searching for this is looking to learn. If you aren’t building content to match these searches, then you are being left behind.