May 25th, 2010 by Nick

There are various types of users who search for websites within search engines. Some people will be searching for a specific piece of information and product and will be very descriptive as to what they type in the initial search box. Others however, may not be so sure what they are looking for and will just type the odd word relating to what they are interested in or a couple of possible related words.

The Google suggestion tool is designed to help users in their searches and a lot of the time it probably does. For example, imagine that a person wants to look for steak recipes. They are not entirely sure what type of dish they want to choose, so would put steak into Google, and Google would offer some recommendations as to what specific dish they may want to search for. Brilliant you may think, but if you happen to sell the one dish which Google does not recommend, then you are missing out because of the search engine, not because of the user.

So now not only do we need to aim our search engine optimisation techniques at human users, we also need to second guess what the search engines are going to come up with. Both Yahoo and Bing offer similar suggestion facilities, so with this approach to online searching being set to stay, anybody involved in website marketing needs to be aware of this.

Before the panic sets in, this is not as dramatic or as damaging as it may first seem. Google is all about providing the best service for its users, therefore is guaranteed to be using the most commonly searched for, or popular key phrases. Research is the best way to go about this as is basic keyword identification, and working with Google to see what its strongest suggestions are can ensure that your links are being picked up by the search engines.

It is also worth remembering that it is still human users which are browsing these search engines and as effective and helpful as suggestion tools are, they are not going to replace human searches overnight. There are a lot of people using search engines who know exactly what they are looking for, and they are not going to let Google or Yahoo tell them what to search for.

The other thing to remember is that these search engines do not always get it right, which in turn can actually result in users being forced to put something more specific in. For example, if somebody was searching for apple recipes over steak recipes, then simply putting the world ‘apple’ into a search engine would produce suggestions of iPods and the Apple electronic store. In situations like this, the human user is forced to think more about what they want and almost override the suggestion tool by putting in their own phrase.

Google suggestion is definitely worth considering in your SEO efforts but let’s not underestimate our human users just yet.

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