This is kind of mind-blowing to me that this doesn't seem to be a metric in SEO. How many keystrokes of a correct search term does it take for Google autocomplete to hint your website/product/service? How many times have you started searching something, got an autocomplete hint for something you wanted to check out, clicked it and and then went with the first result?
Is this valuable, to try to get your product to piggy-back with common autocomplete hints? I know it will still boil down to search result listings since autocomplete hints just bring up a new search, but the autocomplete hint can take the person to a completely different search where you have an advantage. Google obviously knows this, and it only takes one keystroke, 'g', to put 'google' in the hints.
What are the ways autocomplete hints can be influenced? Does anyone even have an idea? At least from what I can tell, it does seem tied to popularity, but not 1:1. It could be something for SEO folks to check out. It likely won't be about trying to get your term to pop-up more often, but rather, trying to create similar terms to common hints so that yours pops-up as well, hoping some people will abandon their original search term and click the hint that gives you an advantage.
EDIT: OK, I did find some SEO firms that do try to influence autocomplete, but that seems to be all they are interested in: changing it. How about working in what is already there, like I outlined here?
Huge hole in SEO?
- Jackolantern
- Posts: 10893
- Joined: Wed Jul 01, 2009 11:00 pm
Huge hole in SEO?
The indelible lord of tl;dr
Re: Huge hole in SEO?
Jackolantern wrote:This is kind of mind-blowing to me that this doesn't seem to be a metric in SEO. How many keystrokes of a correct search term does it take for Google autocomplete to hint your website/product/service? How many times have you started searching something, got an autocomplete hint for something you wanted to check out, clicked it and and then went with the first result?
Is this valuable, to try to get your product to piggy-back with common autocomplete hints? I know it will still boil down to search result listings since autocomplete hints just bring up a new search, but the autocomplete hint can take the person to a completely different search where you have an advantage. Google obviously knows this, and it only takes one keystroke, 'g', to put 'google' in the hints.
What are the ways autocomplete hints can be influenced? Does anyone even have an idea? At least from what I can tell, it does seem tied to popularity, but not 1:1. It could be something for SEO folks to check out. It likely won't be about trying to get your term to pop-up more often, but rather, trying to create similar terms to common hints so that yours pops-up as well, hoping some people will abandon their original search term and click the hint that gives you an advantage.
EDIT: OK, I did find some SEO firms that do try to influence autocomplete, but that seems to be all they are interested in: changing it. How about working in what is already there, like I outlined here?
I like this idea and havn't thought about it yet. Might be worth a try =]