The Adido Digital Blog

In the last year or so, you've probably noticed that Google has made a couple of important changes to its search box. Around a month ago, Google made its search box a lot bigger. They claimed that they did this for a number of reasons including the fact that we now use more words when we search, that users prefer to see bigger characters when they type and that they wanted to focus more on search. How a bigger box does this, we're not quite really sure.

One of the biggest things they have introduced (which has impacted SEO, PPC and search marketing in a big way) is 'Google Suggest'. It went global in Summer 2008 having been in trial for several years and has since been replicated across the major search engines. If you aren't sure what Google Suggest is, it is a drop down list which appears when you are typing something into Google which tries to predict / help you to with your search. An example is shown below


While it does a very good job of this most of the time it seems that Google doesn't realise that Adido means Adido. If we have to see 'audio' one more time, we'll start using Bing...

One of the things that we've noticed is that users have started to use Google Suggest. A lot. Having looked at the analytics for several of our clients, we've noticed some of the top search phrases which generate search traffic have started to look artificial or strange. Why would a seemingly low volume or long tail search phrase start be one of the top search phrases for a particular client?

The answer is Google Suggest. Users are lazy and the idea of clicking a phrase they want to look for rather than type another letter on their keyboard is very appealing to a lot of people.

While the intentions for developing the Google Suggest might seem perfectly legitimate, in that it wants to help make it faster for users to find what they want, it could be viewed that Google is actually trying to engineer or control your searches towards the phrases which is wants you to click on. After all, Google made 97% of its income in 2008 from Google Adwords, its Pay Per Click platform.

It is not clear how the phrases which are listed in the suggest box are put there. Google Suggest help says that it lists the phrases is made up of many things from the amount of searches carried out on a phrase, studying what logged in users have searched for in the past and to how many advertisers there are on the relevant phrases.

Whilst, it might be very cynical for us to say that Google created Google Suggest for its own benefit, one thing that we can say is that it is certainly influencing users in the way that they search. While in the past there may have been dozens of different search phrases for one product, there are now only a handful of phrases which appear in the analytics.

While this might actually make your pay per click campaigns more expensive in the long run (more people searching on less phrases will increase competition) it is essential that you check the Google suggest to get the best from your digital & search marketing campaigns. Miss this, and you might miss out on big amounts of traffic.