ATLANTA - The most recent graduate from the Google School of Hard Knocks (aka Google Labs) is the Google Suggest tool.
Straight from the horse's mouth:
Google Suggest is a feature that analyzes what you're typing into the search box and offers relevant suggested search terms in real time. You can choose one of the suggested queries by moving up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse.
Interesting. So let's examine the impact of Google Suggest on our SEO practices using a real world example. A search for the term "real estate" (without the quotes) used to look like this:
With the addition of Google Suggest as a standard offering on the home page, the same search for "real estate" now looks like this:
While it is too early to tell (unless you collect mounds of data from Google traffic) I find my personal practices shifting towards selecting a suggested term as opposed to finishing what I had intended on typing.
The most common way to target a search term may eventually be by following the suggestions that Google is now forcing on the screen. We will need more data to analyze the true impact but my qualitative analysis skills (my personal search habits) tell me that this will be an enormous factor in the Google SEO world moving forward.
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Greg Tirico is an e-Marketing Project Manager at Akzo Nobel Coatings in Atlanta. He can be reached at gregt12 [at] gmail.com
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