Autocomplete: the questions Google whispers to you
The search bar completes your half-typed sentences with what people really type. It is a free research tool, no account needed, and nobody thinks of using it. Tools series, part two.
The previous part asked you to open a tool. This one doesn’t even ask for that: the instrument is Google’s search bar itself, and what it suggests while you type.
Where the suggestions come from
Start typing “plumber lausanne” and Google completes: emergency, price, reviews, Sunday. These predictions don’t spring from an algorithm’s imagination: Google explains that they reflect real searches, weighted by their frequency, their freshness and the location of the person typing. In other words, every suggestion is a sentence that people, near you, have actually submitted to the engine. That is exactly the raw material the FAQ part of the series for non-specialists needed: the questions as they get asked, in the words they get asked in.
Google also documents the fact that these predictions are filtered and personalized; for a clean harvest, use a private browsing window, so your own habits don’t color what you observe.
The harvest, methodically
The exercise takes half an hour and is repeated twice a year. Type your trade, then your trade followed by each letter of the alphabet: “painter a”, “painter b”, “painter c”… Each letter brings out a fresh cluster of suggestions. Repeat the exercise with question openers: “how”, “how much”, “why”, “when” followed by your topic. Note everything down in a spreadsheet, without sorting while you harvest.
Round it out with the bottom of the results page: the “People also ask” and “Related searches” blocks extend the same seam. One search on your main topic, then one on each question found, and the table fills itself: every Google answer suggests the neighboring questions.
What to do with it
Sort the harvest into three piles. The questions your site already answers: check that the page that answers uses the words of the question, not yours. The questions nobody answers well: those are your next articles, one per question, with the question as the title. The questions that reveal a commercial expectation, price, lead time, emergency, Sunday: those don’t deserve an article but a direct answer on your service pages, because the person typing them is a customer in the middle of choosing.
This sorting joins what the series for non-specialists called answering the questions people type: autocomplete is simply the most direct way to draw up the list of those questions without guessing anything.
Next part: once the pages are written, Search Console shows you the queries on which they actually appear, and that is where the work gets corrected.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.