LeadQual Blog

Google has finally launched Google Suggestion, a tool which was started back in 2004, but was never released. If you go to Google.com and start typing out a search query, you will now see “suggested keywords” appear in a drop down. This seems to only work on their homepage. Once you make a search query you will no longer see the suggestions. For people who need keyword suggestions for the SEM campaigns, this can be a pretty handy tool to use.

Don’t forget that this is a great way to discover negative (google) or excluded (yahoo) keywords. Negative keywords are keywords you specify in your SEM campaign as keywords you DO NOT want your ad to show on. For example if you are selling books, but don’t sell education books, you would have the keyword books, but negative out the keyword education.

Yahoo! has had a suggestion bar for a while now. How this affects the way searchers behave remains to be seen. One affect it could have is to lower the cases of misspellings. Another is to potentially increase the use of longer search queries by users who previously only used 1-2 word queries. If there are any dramatic changes in either of these areas, it could potentially shift the way you should setup and maintain your Google SEM campaigns.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Tags: google, Google News, Search Engine Marketing

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.