How does Google Suggest affect companies’ online reputation?

Google places great importance on the popularity of the queries typed by users to display keywords in its Google Suggest.

By associating brands with queries, the keywords suggested by Google are therefore critically important for companies, as they influence the reader’s behavior and their perception of the company.

So we asked ourselves which keywords were associated with publicly traded French companies. The goal: to get an overview of Google’s suggestions for leading French companies.

Methodology: to do this, we extracted the Google Suggest results for the CAC 40 All-Tradable. The CAC All-Tradable is an index that continuously tracks the trend of the 330 largest stocks on the Paris Stock Exchange. When a search is performed without being logged into a Google account (Gmail, Google My Business, Google+, etc.), Google Suggest displays a maximum of 4 suggestions. We therefore retrieved these suggestions using Google Suggest’s undocumented API for the 330 company names on 06/05.

Top 10 Google Suggest keywords for the CAC 40 All-Tradable

Here are the Top 10 Google Suggest keywords for the CAC 40 All-Tradable:

1. Stock market (174 occurrences)
2. Recruitment (146 occurrences)
3. Boursorama (70 occurrences)
4. Lyon (54 occurrences)
5. Share (53 occurrences)
6. Price (48 occurrences)
7. Reviews (42 occurrences)
8. Address (35 occurrences)
9. Logo (33 occurrences)
10. Wiki (28 occurrences)

In the Top 3 of this list, the term “stock market” appears first. This can be explained by the fact that users are primarily interested in the real-time fluctuations of these companies’ stock prices. Their goal is to have enough financial information to decide whether or not to invest in the stock market.

The term “recruitment” logically comes next, as users are naturally interested in the job or internship openings these large companies might offer.

Still in line with the idea that users are primarily looking for information about these companies’ stock listings, “Boursorama”, France’s leading online stock-market information site, then appears in third position among the Google Suggest occurrences for the CAC 40 All-Tradable.

The Top 10 represents around 22% of the total Google Suggest results for the CAC 40 All-Tradable.

The different categories of Google Suggest results for the CAC 40 All-Tradable

We also grouped the occurrences into categories to get a more concise view of the types of queries associated with CAC 40 All-Tradable companies.

Here is the top 10 of these categories:

1. Cities and countries (481 occurrences). Examples of keywords in this category associated with CAC 40 All-Tradable companies in Google Suggest: “Morocco”, “Lyon”, “Marseille”….
2. Stock market (“shareholder”, “shareholding”, “stock market”… 444 occurrences).
3. Brand (“Vinci”, “rentabiliweb”… 147 occurrences).
4. General information (“Wikipedia”, “wiki”, “revenue”… 124 occurrences).
5. Company products & services (“perfume”, “travel”, “restaurant”… 122 occurrences).
6. Company contact details (“contact”, “phone”, “headquarters”… 92 occurrences).
7. Reviews (“forum”, “rumors”… 64 occurrences).
8. Company type (“ltd”, “s.a”… 52 occurrences).
9. News (“current events”, “news”… 14 occurrences).
10. Promotions (“promotion”, “pricing”… 11 occurrences).

Surprisingly, it is not the “stock market” category that ranks first here, but the “cities and countries” category. The national and international reach of CAC 40 All-Tradable companies certainly explains much of this top spot.

The “stock market” category logically comes next.

Then comes the “brand” category, which shows users’ desire to learn about the company in more depth.

This Top 10 of categories represents around 60% of the total Google Suggest results for the CAC 40 All-Tradable.

Why it pays for companies to rank well in Google Suggest

This data shows that users research a wide range of aspects of a company (financial, historical, and so on). Google, in turn, suggests queries along these lines to users.

It is therefore worthwhile for brands to rank on keywords that work in their favor. Rather than ranking on “neutral” queries, such as contact details, companies can position themselves on Google Suggest keywords related to the company’s products and services, for example. This can bring awareness, credibility, and qualified traffic.

Companies must also keep an eye on their online reputation in order to appear well on the “reviews” keyword, which is present in the Top 10 keywords and is one of the CAC 40 All-Tradable categories. This can be problematic if the sites ranking on this query do not reflect the reality of the market (with negative reviews…).

The “promotion” category is also a potential area for improvement. This term can indeed steer users toward affiliates that may reduce the company’s revenue.

The “brand” category is also a potential area for progress. Google Suggest can indeed lead users to brands other than your own — that is just as many people who might visit third-party sites that could mention incorrect or negative things about you. And just as many potential customers lost, who most likely wanted, thanks to their initial query, to visit your official website.