Google Suggest, or Google’s “autocomplete suggestions” propose queries to users while they are searching for information; can you imagine the amount of traffic you could capture if you put this Google resource to work for you…?
Today I am going to share with you a good SEO trick. Simple and elegant! One of those you don’t come across every day 😉
You will learn how to attract visitors to your website by influencing Google’s autocomplete suggestions. In addition, you will see it with a couple of practical examples (one of them, made in posicionamientoweb.cat).
I’m sure you know what Google suggest is . But just in case, I’ll quickly introduce you to the topic.
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What is Google suggest?
Google autocomplete suggestions are queries proposed by the search engine while you are typing in the search box. So, when you type, for example, “hotels”, Google will offer you related queries, to try to anticipate what you have in mind, or to offer you alternatives about how you can search for the information you may be interested in. We can see it in the following screenshot.
As you can see, for the word “hotels”, the search engine offers you the alternatives “charming hotels”, “cheap hotels” and “hotels in benidorm”.
The interesting thing about appearing in Google Suggestions is that if you have, to continue with the example, a hotel, and your website is well positioned for the keyword “charming hotels”, you can get a lot of traffic. And they are good visitors, because they are looking for precisely what your business offers them.
The suggestions it makes are based mainly on searches you have made yourself in the past, and (more interestingly) on searches made by other users.
The problem is that appearing in Google’s suggestions is not up to you… Or so Google would like you to think. The truth is that suggestions has a flaw, where you can slip through, and that’s what today’s trick is all about.
If you follow all the steps, you can turn Google into something like your personal flyer delivery person🙂
To begin with, I will give an introductory example of a website that is doing this with good results. We will then discuss our case study.
How to change Google suggestion results: case study from losandalucesson.com
The Internet belongs to everyone, and that is positive, but it also has its dark side. The website losandalucesson.com was launched by a group of young entrepreneurs tired of the stereotypes that circulated on the Web about the people of Andalusia. The promoters of this website were fed up with the fact that, when typing “Andalusians are” in the Google search box, suggest returned results such as “lazy, uneducated, illiterate, illiterate, thugs”, etc. What is most disturbing is that, if the autocomplete suggestions offer these search alternatives, it is because a relevant number of users have made these queries, probably with the intention of corroborating their biases.
Well, what this site does is to make a button available to users. Clicking on it launches a query about Andalusians with a positive adjective (“Andalusians are smart/intelligent/creative/hospitable”, etc).
The more people use the button, the more searches there will be with positive appellatives about Andalusians.
And the truth is that losandalucesson.com seems to be getting closer to its goal, as we can see in the last suggestion in the following screenshot.
Suggestions would certainly not “say” that Andalusians are “enterprising” if it were not for the work done by the Losandalucesson project.
How to attract visitors by influencing Google Suggest: case study of rodanet.com
The time has come to explain how you can take advantage of the same fundamentals that have been applied in losandalucesson.com to generate traffic to your website, and we are going to see it with our own case study.
To manipulate the results of Autocomplete Suggestions we have had to resort to other websites of ours, such as verfutbolonline.es.
If you enter this site, you will see some red rounded logos in the screenshot below:
When a user clicks on them, we do not send them to the indicated channel, but to the next Google search:
As you may have guessed by now, we do not do this to get traffic through verfutbolonline.es. That is why, among other things, we do not link to the website, but only to a Google search.
The objective of this tactic is that Google interprets that many people have made the search “seo posicionamientoweb cat”. What do we get with this…? When someone enters a word like “seo” in Google, suggest recommends the query we want 😉
Very important! You have to make sure that the query you want to appear in the autocomplete suggestions matches a keyword for which you appear first in the SERP’s, or you will be giving away traffic to someone else! (probably from your competitors).
The truth is that the website vertutbolonline.es was not created to get in touch with suggestions. It was a project that I was very fond of, but it got complicated. I had to remove the streams (due to legal issues) and the site reached a quite important bounce rate. Because of complications like this, the site went from being in the top 3 SERPs for keywords like “soccer online” or “watch soccer online” to appearing on the third page of results. Since he had already foreseen the disaster before it happened, he had had time to think about how best to take advantage of it. In this world it pays to be flexible; it allows you to turn a defeat into a victory😉
The website had reached 1000 users simultaneously during important matches, such as a Barça-Madrid match, for example. Now go on, and although the visits have dropped a lot, you have already seen the results with the Google suggestions experiment.
Anyway… So much for the easy part! I’m sure you’re already thinking of different ways to put this SEO trick into practice. But, to make sure it works, you’re going to have to pull out all the stops.
In our case, to make sure we appeared in the search suggestions, we used another method based on the same idea, but slightly different. Let me explain!
If someone, by typing error, types directly in his browser seies.ly, this error has about 2500 organic searches per month for example (i.e. series.ly without the “r”), is sending a request to connect to our domain, rodanet.com, but redirecting the user here:
Exactly, to the same search that is accessed through the verfutbolonline.es logos 😀
We have done things like this in about 25 domains. Apart from the query “seo positioning web cat”, we have also targeted “seo positioning web cat consultant”, and this is the result:
You may be asking yourself. “But isn’t this penalizable?”. But keep in mind that we are not putting massive links and redirects to a website, but only to a Google search.
I think that Google, who are so confident of their algorithmic perfection, should get their act together a bit…. At this point it seems incredible that we can sneak it with tricks like this. However, if they don’t, that’s fine with me! We will continue to put the autocomplete suggestions to work for us 😉
On the other hand, this is a risky post, which may cause google to kill the work done, but in the same way we are giving clues on how to improve aspects of their own algorithms. We will see if after this publication the suggestions we have worked on continue to appear. If you need a seo Barcelona here we are 🙂
If you liked this SEO trick, don’t forget to share it on social networks! 🙂
Sin asignación particular. Artículos redactados por el el equipo de Rodanet. Varias personas del equipo participan en crear los mejores artículos en cooperación y equipo 💪 Porque nos encanta trabajar en equipo 🔝
