Google Suggests: Hotels.com

If there´s one site that benefits from Google Suggest, it must be Hotels.com. Their site shows up first in Google´s search query suggestions for a highly competitive keyword.

While playing around with Google Suggest, I did a search for “hotels”. After typing four letters - “h-o-t-e” - Google already assumed I was looking for hotels.com. Not the generic term “hotels“, but the Expedia-owned booking site hotels.com:

Free traffic

It´s not the first time that I saw Google suggesting a website instead of a keyword, but only when searching for a brand term (e.g. “youtube” or “facebook”). Hotels.com has the advantage that their brand is a keyword, so they may catch a lot of long-tail traffic of people who were originally looking for:

• “hotel reviews”
• “hotel rooms”
• “hotel accomodation”
• “hotel in “
• etc

The amount of traffic that hotels.com will receive, depends on the percentage of searchers that will click on the first query suggestion. Keeping in mind that the first result in the SERP´s receives about 50% of all clicks, ranking first in Google Suggest will possibly also dramatically improve their traffic.

Google´s Golden Guess

Of all the possible search queries starting with “hotel”, why would Google suggest the site “hotels.com“? After all, the search volume of the query “hotels” is much higher: