Google Suggest And WordPress SEO

Did you know that you can use the Google suggest function on a search to improve SEO and match blog post titles to what people are actually searching for?

Match Your Blog Post Titles To Real Searches

Imagine this, you go to Google and search for something, and the title of the page that is returned exactly matches what you have typed in.  That is the link you will click first not some related search result Google has seen fit to provide you with.

Using the technique I’m about to explain that is what you can do for all your blog posts.

Use What People Are Searching for, Not What You Think They Are Searching for.

You may spend hours crafting quality content, but if you don’t match your SEO settings such as title and meta description to what people are actually typing in as search queries there is very little chance you will get click throughs from Google and Co.

What you think people will be searching for when trying to match up your content and what they actually type are sometimes completely different.

Google suggest give you real time data on what people are typing.

How It Works

If you go to a Google search page and start typing, you will see a suggestion appear, see this screen grab where I started to typing in “WordPress How To”.  The top four most searched for queries are shown to me.

I can see that “WordPress how to use” is the top search and I could use this as my post title, and match my content directly to the most popular search. Google indexes my content and serves it up (hopefully) when that query is typed in.

Using This Technique To Plan Content

Not only can I use this technique to give my post a relevant title, I can also use this to plan my content.  If, for example, I was writing a series of WordPress how to articles, I can get a series of relevant posts titles using this technique, but adding a – z onto the end of my “WordPress how to”  query and I suddenly get 26*4 article suggestions.

WordPress How To A give me these, continue with WordPress How To B, etc etc.

Caveat

As with all SEO techniques, make sure you are writing for humans first and for the search engines second, if you post titles don’t make sense, people will notice and assume you are gaming the search engines rather than creating content for people.  Here is an example, if I’m writing my WordPress how to series, by adding some abbreviation (human readable, but ignored by the search engines) I can make the post title make sense.

“WordPress How To: Add A Widget”

instead of

“WordPress How To Add A Widget”

Hat Tip

A huge hat tip to Skelliewag who first suggested this technique in one of her blog posts.  Sorry I cannot find the original, but she proposed that you use this when creating a brand new blog to get traction with posts that match what people are search for in your niche.

WordPress SEO Workshop

I’m running a WordPress SEO workshop on Thursday 21st June where I will show you how to use this technique along with many other tips and techniques.

The workshop is no cost, but seats are limited, check out this post for details.

SORRY WEBINAR CLOSED

 

 

 

Image by jeffanddayna