Google Suggest is a great feature for searchers and it was first rolled out to general public around February of 2009. Predictive search or Google Suggest had been in the Google labs for over 4 years or BETA mode. Google Suggest assists searchers with their query and automatically pops up a bunch of keywords while a user is typing. See the screenshot below for one of the query:

Google-Suggest

This is truly one of the search engine innovation and Google has done a great job with Google Suggest. Predictive technology is always tough and predicting what a user is intending to search is even more tougher. Google has come very close to predicting what a searcher is looking for with the Google suggest feature. Other search engines were really fast to catch on to this predictive search feature too. Yahoo had rolled out its own predictive search feature a couple of years back which looks like the screenshot below:

Yahoo-Search-Suggest

SEO keyword research with Google Suggest
The goal of this post is to show you how you can perform some basic level keyword research with Google suggest. For this post, i took a generic, high volume “credit card” keyword.

Google-Credit-Card-Suggest

When i did a search for a generic keyword called “Credit Card” the Google Suggest feature suggested me with few keywords that it thinks might be the topic of my interest. This suggestions are based on a broad category (read buckets) of keywords that are associated with the term credit card. As you can see the other categories of keywords are “credit cards for bad credit” “credit card offers” “credit card calculator” “credit card debt” and more. If i were an affiliate marketer who wants to develop a web site for selling credit card applications then this could be my main big bucket of keywords. In keyword research, the idea is to go broader at the top (head level, high volume terms) and then drill down to more granular keywords (low volume, long tail keywords).

Google-Credit-Card-Bad-Credit

Now, lets say that you have the main categories of keywords that you can associate with the head term “Credit Card” We can now take a keyword called “Credit Cards for bad credit”, which Google suggested as a possible match, as a keyword category. You can now drill down into this top level bucket for “credit cards for bad credit” and see additional keywords that Google thinks could fit well with your query.

Now, suddenly i have most of the keywords that Google thinks go well with “credit cards for bad credit” Look at the range of keywords that came up. This list has more or less all the tail terms associated with the head term “credit cards for bad credit” Now, you can do this for the rest of the head terms that you started with and suddenly you have about 100+ keywords that you can target on your new web site. This is great data right from the source and without using any 3rd party keyword research tool. Sure, the most optimal method is to combine your data from few sources and then creating a master keyword list.

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