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

[randfish]

Have you had success with any particular methodologies that you'd recommend?

[NickSamuel]

I suppose you're correct but it's all relative to the keyword in question, isn't it?

[Nexa]

Nice Workaround

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

Oh well call me a joke if you want but nothing comes in my mind except lmgtfu.com

The best way to push someone button... Actually push the button... literally...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=literally+push+the+button....

[NikolasNikolaou]

I guess a good "trick" in my opinion would be to create a contest and promote it through image sharing sites like pinterest, tumblr, or youtube , facebook and any other social site or method you can get traffic from with an attention grabbing image * reshare to win * and stating the contest as a search a term contest (no link at all) to check out the prizes .Freebies always seem to drive crazy traffic, why not use it to your advantage as a influence on search suggest.

Another influence I use to build brand awareness and in a way search suggest is stating the company/website name (semi emd though) instead of a link.

I think that some people don't seem to get the methodology of Seo, creating virality and building a brand. It has to stand out from classic onpage optimisation and offpage link building. THINK OUT OF THE BOX.

The one thing that gave me an edge as a marketer in my industry when I first started on ( a revenue sharing site ) was a variation of a industry keyword that I built up from >10 searches monthly up to 4400 exact match searches monthly (singular phrase) and 1300 exact match (plural) the long tail is even more in less than 9 months by posting about recommendations for those products in industry relative forums building up in a way my "own" keyword .

[Yoav_Vilner]

White hat methods: Pay for a commercial via TV or radio to convince people to search for your brand+positive keyword.

Ask all of your family, friends or colleagues to search for "your brand+positive keyword".

Co-operate with bloggers and online partners to search for "your brand+positive keyword".

Start a social campaign (FB contest or PPC) to convince people to search for "your brand+positive keyword".

black hat methods - sadly some people take advantage of black hat methods on this one, such as paying for AOL's Mechanical Turks system.

[Talooma]

There was a very clever Adwords campaign by Converse. Used Adwords very intelligently.

[skehoe]

Great idea your friend had.

I too have a friend who successfully changed Google suggest by indexing pages on a variety of websites & news distribution channels for more desirable keywords.

I have noticed if you don't teach Google what to suggest then it will sometimes offer 'negative' suggestions even if there is no content to be found.  To avoid a 'crisis' you a best off choosing your own keywords and teach google what is relevant and what is not

[Danapollo]

I know this is an old feed - but on the subject of influencing the 'Search Suggest'... has anyone played the 'LogosQuiz' game on the iPhone - if not, hear me out, because it is interesting (I think...)!

The game is pretty simple, you've just got to guess company logos. However, you are able to obtain hints - and these hints come in the form of full sentences.

Now then, I was stuck on a few of these last night and thought I'd ping one of the 'hints' over to google. I literally got 2 words into it and the FULL hint (about 10 words) was suggested (something about computer software manufacturer on east coast of somewhere or other...).

I know this isn't about 'how' to influence the Search Suggest - but just look at how powerful the 'social sphere' is when a game like this is able to have such control over the suggestions (they're missing the trick with marketing though, because the game developers don't rank for the hints!).

Just thought I'd share that with you guys - something a little light-hearted and kinda fun!

[KeriMorgret]

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

[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.

[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.

[nyanainc]

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

[nyanainc]

what is the Mechanical turk?

[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?"

[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.

[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....

[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.

[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

[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?

[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

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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?

[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...

[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

[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.

[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.

[Cyle]

here is a link to Mechanical Turk: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome you can leverage it to do tons of things.

[aarondicks]

What is a mechanical turk?

[aarondicks]

Good explanation - so this can in theory be used for deep linking in the short term?...

[aarondicks]

Yes please explain more! I'd love to learn what you mean? As in post URL's, or ask people to search for your terms?!

[bcmull]

Explain more please?

[Tre]

• Tweet with a link to the Google SERP--requires something compelling.
• Buy CPC traffic (such as from a tier 2 search network) and use the SERP as the landing page. You can buy clicks for less than $0.01, but Google may be able to ignore all of the traffic from click fraud (which seems inevitable at that price point).
• Buy remnant banner space if there is a compelling reason that a user would want to conduct the search.

[Robert_Nemec]

In one of cases we worked on Google suggested "Brand name - very harmful keywords". It was mainly thanks to "tabloid campaign."

We negotiated with the owners of websites and with a small legal help they deleted the pages where were the brand name and the harmful keywords. Then we use Google Webmaster Tools to inform Google about these changes (Webpage removal request tool).

After that the harmful keyword dissapared from suggesting.

Since than we use it successfully again and again. It seems, Google needs pages where are both brand name and problematic keyword(s) highlighted (title, Hn...).

[MattFielding]

When it was first launched, Google suggestions came with a 'number of results' figure next to them, which disappeared soon after. Google Suggests is for ease of use, rather than for any SEO tactics, so they removed the figures.

[philipjterry]

How does Google prioritize the what comes up in the auto-complete suggestions? By search volume or number of results or.......?

[Mehmet.Korukmez]

Google is going crazy with Exact Match Domain Names.I have searched for philips home theatre keyword (Google UK) and Google has returned top 3 results from philips UK and 2 other results from USA and India (.in and subdomain from .com).

I have been testing power of the exact match on the url,so far I have reached to the position 9 on facebook live keyword(UK) with facebooklive.co.uk (google) and Position 2 on Yahoo and Bing.

Not sure this is Google's interim solution until they find a better algorithm method after the Panda operation but this works!...

[MattFielding]

The other side to this is the fact that it's easier to optimize for the terms Google Suggest already gives you than to try to make Google suggest the terms you're optimizing for. Use it as keyword research - if you're optimizing a bracelets e-commerce site, you'll see Google suggest 'bracelets for men' and 'bracelets for women' - other queries will produce less obvious results!

[philipjterry]

Just in case you have not read this already........

http://searchengineland.com/how-to-use-google-instant-as-a-powerful-link-building-x-ray-51729

[CareerBliss]

So, Mechanical Turk is a an Amazon solution for a scalable workforce. You can have thousands of people around the world complete simple tasks for you. They are your brute force solution for getting work done. So, in the instance of manipulating suggested search, you utilize them to perform different queries other than company + scam in Google in order to, over time, knock that terms OFF of suggested search.

[jsturgeon]

Has anyone noticed a higher correlation among sites that use Google custom search? I know the queries made through custom search aren't necessarily using brand keywords, but I imagine that a higher volume of searches that include your domain must have an impact on autocomplete.

[philipjterry]

I like to find root causes and reasons why events happen:

causes of....

effects of....

Or if it is complicated and needs simplifying:

whats the reasoning.....

in a nutshell <then the="" first="" two="" letters="" of="" what="" you="" want="">(this method seems to work well back to front</then>

[SEOTeam35]

Press Releases and Google News- 5-6 releases a month in order to influence the suggest for a particular phrase and also mentioned in Google News for a particular article or content can help to include the keywords in the suggest.

[PrivateNameAM]

Long tail anchor tags and (maybe) tags in clouds.

[rishil]

I came in to add link to my post http://explicitly.me/manipulating-google-suggest-results-–-an-alternative-theory but seems coule of people have already done that Thanks guys!

[SallyO]

That's what I'm also interested in. What do you ask exactly to do?

[Goetzman]

If I may be so blunt: What do you ask people on the mechanical turk to do? estimated costs?

[RobertChapman]

Are mechanical turks easy to use?

Any comments?