Influencing Google Suggest

[danwhitehouse]

There was a recent post on the net about influencing suggest, but it did not go into great detail, only a summary.

There was some great ideas in the post and one of the ones that carries immediate 'actions' for a lot of SEOs.

Here's my list of items that we're going to focus on more to try and lift ourselves into the top suggested spot, as a result of what we've learned. What are yours?

- increase mentions of words (non anchors)
- news titles
- unique users
- geography of searchers
- branding
- product naming
- content marketing
- forums, blogs
- bookmarks

[tedster]

Great topic. One of the things people rarely think about when their rankings stay the same but traffic falls way off, is whether the targeted query phrase changed position in the Suggestions drop-down. That can explain a lot of mysteries!

One big factor in Google Suggest is query volume. People have tried to influence Suggest by generating artificial search traffic (MTurk and the like) and it used to work pretty easily. These days from the reports I hear, not so much.

Another factor that needs to be taken into account is that Suggestions are heavily geo-located and can vary even within the same city. That creates some serious analysis challenges!

[danwhitehouse]

Ted,
Agreed that search volume is key. I've been Googling for hours how to increase search volume for branded terms, but nothing apparent appears

Maybe it's a case of everything else. Create a presence, upscale and make it bigger and better and the searches will reflect.

Apologies for the missing 'u' in the title..

[Simsi]

increase mentions of words (non anchors)

I'm confused by this thread. Am I right in thinking the "suggestion" here is that by using a certain phrase - that you presumably rank well for - lots of times, it becomes the first suggestion when people start to type in Google's search box, so when people select it, there you are at no 1?

[tedster]

The idea really has two parts. First, the search phrase does show up as a top Suggestion, early on as someone begins to type that phrase. Traffic is definitely hurt if your keyword phrase does not show up at all or is toward the bottom.

And the second part of the idea (basically it's being assumed here) is that you want to be ranking well for that phrase.

[onebuyone]

Problem is that you have no idea if Google may be using completely different query for search and then just highlight words from original one.

I mean situation when you search for "blue widgets", but Google will show you results for "Blue widgets New York" anyway.

[danwhitehouse]

I think I was thinking more of how to 'rank up' in Google suggest rather than enter suggest for a term. Search volume and impressions of phrase on the net is key, but how do we get them there legitimately.