New Google Features and SEO Implications

I was pretty excited this morning as Google released some great new features, including an increased snippet size, better Google Insights targeting, and a related searches feature. The related searches feature, aside from being a great user-friendly addition to the Google SERP page, is going to be a big help to SEOs conducting keyword research.

The new feature appears when searching for just about any term – I’ll use the phrase Auto Parts:

Scrolling to the bottom of the result page you’ll notice immediately the related searches section:

This section highlights search queries that contain topics related to Auto Parts. As an SEO, and as a user, I immediately love this, since Google has in effect built me a highly efficient long-tail keyword research tool, while making things easier to find during regular searching, and also gives us a peek under the hood of their contextual search algorithm. For example we can see in this case that used auto parts, nissan auto parts, and Jeep auto parts are all considered by Google to be related to the central topic of auto parts.

With this in mind, if I were trying to build content for a page to rank well for the phrase “Auto Parts” I may want to consider adding a paragraph on the topic of “Nissan auto parts”, and another section on “used auto parts”. This would then contribute to the overall impression that my page is centralized on the theme of auto parts.

Of course if one of these related terms is popular enough, it may merit building a separate page for, writing some high-quality content, and trying to rank for that term specifically – you’ll have to use your favorite keyword research tool to find out.
 
 
Google has provided us with some great data from its database, it’s up to us to make the best of it.
 
 
Read the official Google news release on the update here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/two-new-improvements-to-google-results.html