Google auto suggest to them going through some significant changes recently. The latest is Google is now auto suggesting brand names when you do a generic search – even if that brand name does not have a single one of the search keywords in it.
Rand Fishkin of Moz was the first to notice the change, when he did a search for “seattle real estate market” and Zillow came up as an autocomplete suggestion.
As you can see, Zillow isn’t even the number one result for that brand query, yet Google is suggesting it.
It also works for even single word keywords, such as “dresses”.
However, this Dillard’s example is a bit unusual because Dillard’s is actually in a department store, it’s not a store that simply sells dresses.
It also works for your yoga pants, with many arguably saying that Lululemon is the company most associated with yoga pants, not to mention the see-through controversy surrounding them.
Another interesting one, especially since we can see Google is clearly favoring Dillard’s once again. This time several others join in the list, but a couple have the term “shoes” in their brand name, but curiously, Nordstrom and Dillards both have shoes added to the end of their brand name, despite it not being a part of their brand.
We’ve seen Google suggesting competitor’s names when refining a search term of the brand and its websites as well as suggesting related (and often competitive) website URLs and related article links.
These are all replicated when someone does the search, and then clicks back into the search box to refine the search.
It also means that SEOs might want to ensure their brands show up for these kinds of generic terms in the refined autocomplete, especially if their competitors are currently showing up.
Jennifer Slegg
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Joseph says
Just a note, this happens on your “second query”. For instance, type “yoga pants” into Chrome omibox. Your first query wont get the brand suggestion. After visiting Google, clicking back into the search box generates the brand guesses. This has been happening for a while actually.
Jennifer Slegg says
Yes, I have that in the blog post… there have been a few different things they have been doing over the last month or so with this, including listing competitors brands when doing a brand search etc.