How dare you suggest such a thing!

Google’s latest search tool Google Suggest is to be launched to the main search on Google.com after graduating from the labs section with honours.  The functionality will dynamically attempt to complete your search query by listing out the most popular searches (alongside their search volumes) beneath the search box as you type.  Clever hey?  But not necessarily too useful unless you are particularly lazy.  But what does this mean for search marketers?

Increased accuracy of searches – This potentially opens up more search volume for the “long tail” of search.  By showing people further options for what they could be searching on to narrow their results we may start to see more and more people performing more targeted searches and thus reducing the volumes on generic keywords and increasing them on specific keywords.

Transparency of the long tail – The long tail, and targetted keywords have long been the selling point for PPC specialists.  The long hours of work needed to generate focussed keyword lists and monitoring the performance of thousands of hours are a strong selling point against somebody managing their own campaign.  But by exposing the keywords available in such an explicit way Google is making things easy for lazy search engine marketers.  Now all they need to do to find long tail keywords is start searching on something generic and note down the variations Google suggests.

More money for Google – there appears to be a trend in these posts on Google doesnt there!  All roads lead to cash!  Basically by allowing advertisers to see the keywords they “could” be bidding on Google is making it easy for them to do so and thus increase the competition and therefore CPC on these keywords.

Removal of mispells? – this is unlikely to happen completely but by showing people what they were trying to search for in this way less people are likely to search on a mispelling.  This has already partially been eradicated through the “did you mean to search for?” message which you get when your fat fingers get the better of you.  But this could mean the final straw for true mispellings.  Oh and guess what, this will lead to higher overall CPC’s as there will be less cheap clicks around.

I will aim to post more when I spot the changes have taken place but thats the long and short of it in my opinion.