Don’t get too excited here… this is neither a how-to nor a success story. It’s merely a hypothetical, and any research or insight you’ve got is more than welcome in the comments.
In commenting on a recent SEOmoz post, I recalled querying Google for a result that began “why did…”, and noticing that the first “suggested result” from Big G was “why did I get married?” My first thought was, of course, “Ha! You poor suckers!”, but my second thought was, “I wonder how many people started a query for something else like I did, but then clicked on said result because it’s just so juicy.”
It was at this point that any good SEO would naturally pose the following question: do users really have enough of an attention deficit that I could lure them away from their original queries with a preposterous train wreck of a keyphrase? And if so, could I really stretch that kind of traffic into legitimately engaged visitors?
I don’t doubt that the answer to the first half of that question is a resounding yes; rather, I’d want to find out how much link building I’d have to do to get my phrase up there and start pulling some serious traffic in. Could I get away with simple on-page optimization and a handful of personal blogs taking my statement seriously and linking to me? I mean, if “Lindsay Lohan” posts as much search traffic as I think it does, what would happen if I could get the phrase “Lindsay Lohan killed in plane crash” up there in the suggestions? Well, I know what would happen – I’d be sued for slander. But let me dream folks… would I be able to garner enough traffic – and manipulate it through creative copywriting – to turn a few conversions (either on my site’s goals or on my affiliate ads)?
I’m guessing the answer to that depends on how good you are at writing subliminal calls to action. Or whether you’re running an overlay ad with the classic “mouse chaser” behavior. So now I’m left wondering what my chances are of infiltrating Google’s or Yahoo’s suggestions on high-traffic partial phrases. How do the suggestions work?
Well, I’ll be the first to admit I never paid attention to it until now, and I have no idea if it works in any unique way. It appears that the suggestions cater more to what’s hot at the time (“why did I get married” actually seems to be referencing the recent Tyler Perry movie released by that name… hardly a veteran of the SERPs and sure to be gone from the suggestions next year). That’s good news for my theory of course, because it means we can piece together a blog and start blasting out fresh content without having to worry so much about overtaking some stodgy set of results that have been standing strong for the past 5 years. The bad news is that the suggestions still seem to prefer high-PR, high-traffic sites in the resulting SERPs – the aforementioned suggestion delivers IMDB, Wikipedia, the official movie site, Amazon and Rotten Tomatoes.
It seems like a difficult playing field to walk onto, but I think in the case of partial phrase suggestions, the sheer number of phrase combinations must be greater than the spectrum of content authoritative sites can spit out. Surely there’s a niche phrase somewhere that you could take ownership of, push into the suggestion tools, and get the bored, net-surfing masses of the world to say, “holy crap, this phrase looks much more interesting than what I was looking for… what was I looking for again anyway?”
