Google Suggest, now called Google Autocomplete, is Google's feature that displays relevant search suggestions while typing a search term. This feature suggests possible relevant search queries based on various factors, including previous search queries, popular search queries, and the search terms that the user has already entered.
Although this search feature was developed to improve the user experience on Google, it has been adopted by many SEOs as a method to find possible relevant Keyword-finding opportunities.
Google Suggest is used not only in Google's main search engine, but also in Google Chrome's search bar, in the Google app, and in various other places in Google Search.
The history of Google Suggest
Google Suggest was first introduced in Google's main desktop search engine in 2004, but was not used as a standard search feature until 2008. Due to various inappropriate suggestions, Google now calls it Google Autocomplete and calls them predictions instead of suggestions[1].
Recently, Google has also started displaying onebox result snippets in Google Autocomplete to make the predictions more useful for searchers. This has resulted in sports results and weather forecasts, for example, being displayed as suggestions for search queries with relevant keywords.
How Google Suggest works
Google Suggestnow called Google Autocomplete, tries to predict what a user is looking for based on various factors and then suggests that search term.
Google has access to a lot of information, especially when users are logged into their Google account. This information is used to find out what users are searching for.
The information Google uses includes previous search terms a user has searched for, popular searches, the terms the searcher has already typed into the search bar, and trending searches.
Its importance for SEO & Marketing
Google Suggest is used by SEOs and content marketers to find relevant Keyword-suggestions and discover popular content for content marketing strategies. It can also be used in combination with a manual analysis of the SERPs can be used to determine the search intent of a particular search term, as well as related topics and keywords.
It is also relevant how the seeker relates to the SERPs behaves, since certain onebox results are displayed directly. This could reduce the number of users navigating to a web page, since they get the information they want directly in the predictions.
Another way to influence user behavior on the SERPs is to use the Traffic to be directed to certain keywords or variants. This can lead to more or less Traffic comes to certain pages, depending on which keywords the pages are targeted at.
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