Yahoo! recently announced that they are making search more intuitive by taking a users location into consideration when suggesting search queries.
Yahoo! Search Assist helps you find what you need with fewer keystrokes by taking into account the location from which you’re searching.
This isn’t exactly ground breaking news as all the other major search engines have had this functionality for some time now, but it’s better late than never.
This is great from a user experience, but I want to focus on how this can be used for PPC management. Using this new ‘search suggest’ functionality for keyword research and coverage can be very valuable to determine coverage on certain keyword themes. I admittedly don’t use Yahoo! as my primary search engine, but I have found myself using this on Google from time to time with some success. It’s important to ensure you have visibility on these suggested keywords if a searcher follows through to a selected term, even if selected accidently.
From a few test searches, it appears that Google’s version of this feature is more accurate than Yahoo! but I recommend using the big three (Bing, Yahoo and Google) for this exercise. Using a few of your higher converting terms, simply start entering each one into the search box to see what the search engine recommends. You can then click on those terms to display the related results. Depending on the relevancy of those keywords, it might make sense to include those in your PPC campaigns.
