Tactics to Influence Keywords in Google's "Search Suggest" / Autocomplete in Instant?

[Mr.Rangen]

I hope that works for +1 button clicks as well! Makes sense though if it truly does just reflect popular search behavior. Sometimes I think it would be better to perform keyword research on auto-complete over the finicky and inaccurate Google KW tool.

[zoicaremus]

• Check all suggestions for your keyword by using the alphabet:

targeted keyword a

targeted keyword ab

targeted keyword ac

• Extract all the questions about your keywords

• Write articles containing clear and straight to the point answers, especially for the questions that have elements that need to be remembered and start ranking for them.

• At the end of each article write this: "If you found the information here useful please bookmark this article or remember to search on Google for "this suggestion"

And voila, in time you will see more and more people remember how to search and thus raise the popularity of those questions in the Google suggestions. You did not exploit or inflate anything - besides your visitor's mind! Haha.

[JamesNorquay]

The best ethical strategy is to use offline media buys to influence the search pattern of users. Working in big agencies where you have combined teams working on various verticals it is some times hard to leverage SEO into the mix, yet once SEO is at the forefront of these campaigns you can really work wonders.

I have not really seen any killer examples of this in play yet, but many companies in AUS are trying these methods.

As Dejan SEO said you just need to get the right messaging in play.

Regards,

James Norquay

[anthony-305442]

I know that the number of searches required to get into autosuggest is quite small. Because my cousin's business whom I'm the webmaster for, is all over it.  And we get like 20 visitors a day...

[jest]

I don't get it, why would you want to influence Google search suggest/auto-complete? Can you provide an example of how you could get more traffic for this?

[BrianCrouch]

The last time you used Google and it auto-suggested a result, you saw those terms/keywords. That impression may not have been tracked, but think of how useful that could be for branding. You type in "ACME" and you see "Acme Rubberbands."
Now you've associated the product with the brand whereas you may not have before, and you may well have been prompted to navigate to that search query.

It's also relevant to reputation management. If you've got a negative suggested query, you'd want to suppress that.

[BrianCrouch]

Fascinating... If I had to pick the hardest kind of word to be able to manipulate on Instant, it would be a two letter verb! Maybe only a personal pronoun would be harder!

[StevenMapes]

To influence it what you need is a term, short-tailed or long-tailed it does not matter, that has at least some CTR.  It doesn't need to be large, 10 a month is more than enough. Then, with this CTR in place, the auto-suggest is influenced by sheer search volumes.  If you track your it you'll see that it takes about between a day and two days for the searches to filter through to auto-suggest. It's pretty much in-line with Insights.

If a keyword has a good history then its more likely to stay in the auto-suggest even if another term trends in the shor-term.  To influence it use social media to get people to search or run competitions etc to suggest people to search.
Pure search volume without CTR will not work. You could fire 10 million searches a day for two weeks it won't appear if there is no CTR.

[JustDucky]

Jest - It's not necessarily the volume of traffic but the quality of the traffic.  Most of these auto-completed (or "suggested") searches contain long tail terms which indicate the user is much more likely to convert to a customer.   My $ .02

[SuperlativB]

I believe this would work for radio, twitter, facebook or display ads aswell. You just cook up a funny consept and go for it. Would be the same practice as for linkbait wouldnt you say?

[Greenman]

I can tell you what can not influence the results of the Google Search Suggest. Just check that the keywords are not displayed sorted by search volume. Take a look at pic. The solution? Content

CpN1f

[Jenni_HeartInternet]

You could also use it in a situation where you're ranking highly for a term but it's not currently showing in Google Suggest.

[BrianCrouch]

I hope they were that intentional, but I  wonder if their Marcom team just thought the simplicity of the call to action might get more results than yet another website to be ignored.

What I mean is, a CTA like "google XYZ"  might get a slight percentage advantage of people above and beyond the response rate on the direct entry of a company URL. Besides, most people tend to Google a brand name to get to their website anyway, rather than enter it in browser....

[scodtt]

Is it possible for that to actually work? I really doubt it.

It seems like Google would figure it out after a while that only people in India are behaving that way, and given that Google localizes results it would only help in India.

Also, how can you be sure that the MTurk people are actually doing what you ask? They aren't providing you a product, they are just searching in some specific way. Every time I've used MTurk I've gotten work product that shows the minimum possible amount of work. If I used them for something that I don't get back I wouldn't have any trust that they are actually doing it.

[scodtt]

That link goes to a godaddy holding page...

I did go and search "is " and google suggested "Is Daniel Tosh gay?" I've never heard of Mr. Tosh, but there you have it.

So I went through the alphabet, it's actually pretty funny:

"Is Anderson Cooper gay?"

"Is Brenda Song pregnant" (I've never heard of her, either.)

"Is croup contagious?"

Then the one about Mr. Tosh, and after that "Is Darrenn Criss gay?" (I don't know him, either. Jeesh, I must be old.)

And on it goes with lots of questions about people being gay or pregnant. O was my favortie, "Is oatmeal gluten free?"

[nyanainc]

what is the Mechanical turk?

[nyanainc]

Thanks for sharing your opinion Syed! I like active members on seomoz!

[riplash]

I've noticed more and more companies doing this on TV advertising campaigns of late - instead of giving out a campaign specific URL, as was the done thing maybe 2-5 years ago, companies are increasingly likely to give a specific search term out.

I wondered about the motives behind it, and recognised that this may be one of them.

[wrttnwrd]

I'm late to this particular party, but here's an approach that's worked for us  helped a friend in reputation management crises:

First, you need to get some indexed content for the phrase you're going to insert into suggest. I'll go with "Gibble Gibbet".

1. Add a page to your own site;
2. Or even better, find a phrase for which you already have indexed content.
3. Either way, get some Twitter/other social traffic going to ensure it stays indexed.

Now, you need to get some search volume:

1. Don't think of this in terms of directly generating search volume. Instead, think of this as a social engineering experiment.
2. Determine what phrase you want to show up in search suggest. I'm sticking with "Gibble Gibbet".
3. Create a test on a service like Amazon Mechanical Turk. Tell everyone involved you need them to tell you the first 2 results they see when they type in "Gibble Gibbet".
4. Send out the test to 5,000 or more people.

Depending on the term, the search volume around it, and the competition among different queries, this should get you what you're looking for.

Not that I've ever done this.

It was a friend of mine.

[KeriMorgret]

Ian, thanks so much for sharing that experience from a friend of yours. Great to see you here in Q&A!