If you have a client that depends on seasonal trends, Google Search Suggest can be quite valueable. Goolge Search Suggest gets some media attention from time-to-time for it’s strange suggestions so you might have heard of it. You can see Suggest in action by starting to type a query in the Google search box and watching what phrases are suggested. This can be entertaining, but there is a good use for it.
In the beginning, Search Suggest had a lag of about 30 days, but now the suggestions seem to be more real-time. Since SEO efforts take a lot of time to achieve positioning, the search suggest can be a good tool to use for identifying phrases to promote for next year’s season. Of course, you can’t promote for things that are flash-in-the-pan results, but overall you can identify new phrases that customers are using RIGHT NOW to look for the products you offer. This can help you create contextually targeted content for the next season based on more than just your historical phrase usage research.
A good example that you can currently see in Google is Valentine’s related. Beyond the phrase research you did to prepare your client for the Valentine’s buying frenzy, you can look at the search suggest box to see what phrases are being searched in the season. You might find some gems that are popularly searched, but not often SEO’d. This year’s trends show searches for homemade gifts, how to write poems, dinner ideas, etc. that you might otherwise not have considered in your optimization strategy.
