Google Suggest, which has been percolating in Google Labs for some time now, is rolling out to Google search users. You’ll know it when you see it: as you start to type in a search phrase it automatically starts recommending popular phrases to you based on what it has already indexed.
Google Suggest Screen Shot
This makes things interesting, to say the least. Many people are speculating now on how this will affect the way people search. For example, most people will probably pick from this list, rather than type in their own phrase as they would have done in the past.
This will most likely cut down on misspelled words, and some “long tail” search phrases as well. Yet others are speculating that it might actually increase the number of words used in a search phrase.
We’ll have to see, but it does seem like it will be harder for small business owners to rank for certain keyword phrases. But it can also be used as a keyword research tool.
Recommendation for small business owners
Type in your keyword phrases and see what Google “suggests”. You may uncover some new phrases that you didn’t know people were searching on. And you’ll want to make sure you concentrate your page optimization and backlinks on the keywords that Google Suggests when people type in the keywords that are relevant to you.
We’ll be following this situation closely so stay tuned for updates.
More on Google Suggest
Here are some other nice write-ups on this new development:
How Google Suggest Changes SEO by Michael Jensen
Free SEO Tips for Google Suggest by Aaron Wall
9 Ideas How Google Suggest Could Change Search Marketing by Scott Clark
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting - Yahoo has implemented a similar feature called “Search Assist”.
Good point Tom - Yes Yahoo has been doing this for a while, and also a new search engine called Cuil does this as well. It’s the sheer volume of searches on Google that makes this development interesting to me.