Google Suggest, which is the Ajax-driven suggestion of alternative searchqueries while you are still typing your initial query into the Google-searchfield, has been online for about a month now: on March 31st, Google hit the switch and activated the feature in Germany. It is time to see how it is doing and analyze the impact it has. Ron 'the Don' Hillmann initiated the discussion on this a few days ago in the SEO-BH-Chat. The basic idea is that Domains which are returned as one of the first suggestions for high-traffic keywords, should have noticeable gains in traffic compared to competitors, ever since Suggest was activated.

A good example for this should be the 'wetter' (weather) keyword – fitted with a decent amount of traffic over the years and the traffic dynamics of the usual competitors between each other should be rather low. When inputting wetter on Google's homepage, we get wetter.de and wetter.com as the first results. Now, if we take a look at both domains' traffic-data through Google Insights, we notice that on the date on which Google Suggest was activated, their traffic took a big leap upwards. As a counter-check we take a look at the numbers for Wetteronline.de, which is not “marketed” as prominently – in this case we are unable to notice any jump at the date of the Suggest activation. This observation is not coined for this keyword either, as we can see similar things happening for other keywords.

What are the conclusions that we can draw from this? Projects that are getting a significant part of their traffic through SEO and who are active in a market which is (also) marked by a few, clearly identifiable “short-head”-keywords, should consider choosing a domain which starts out with the keyword. This seems to be the only way to profit from the “Suggest-Boost” right now and to be honest, I do not think that those fantasy-names that are so popular among startups at the moment are the right way to go. You can nearly start to believe that a certain, successful Internetfirm from Leipzig anticipated this development years ago which led them to bank on strong keyword-domains ...