On March 2, 2014, we were called by a fellow online marketer and entrepreneur in the Minneapolis area. Unfortunately, some former disgruntled employees were posting lots of complaints about him on the internet, which caused the unwanted suggestion “complaints” to appear next to his name.

What was interesting about this case was that the “complaints” suggestion was only appearing in Minneapolis. If you Googled this client outside of the Twin Cities area, the suggestions were fine.

This is the first time I’ve seen a low volume client have a local problem and not a national problem with Google autocomplete.

Localized Google suggestions are more challenging to correct because you need to have lots of people performing searches for you from WITHIN the same city. Either that, or you have to have a pool of unique, working IP addresses from within that city.

Our Strategy To Fix Google Autocomplete Local Suggestions

Volume: Google’s Keyword Planner tool reported ZERO search volume for our “client name + complaints” keyword.

Strategy: As mentioned above, if you want to clean up unwanted suggestions in a particular city, you’ve got to perform searches from computers from inside that city. In order to find people in Minneapolis, we had to run ads online to recruit people to perform those searches for us.

Once somebody in the Minneapolis market responded to our ads, I had them visit whatismyip.com in order to find out the city/state they were in. This is what helped me determine whether or not they were located close enough to the city center to help us. Anyone located outside of the Minneapolis area would see different suggestions and therefore was not helpful to our cause. To make positive changes for our client, ALL searches had to be performed from computers within the Minneapolis market.

To keep things looking natural, we also balanced our approach by having a variety of searches completed outside of the Minneapolis market, too.

Campaign Start Date: March 2, 2014

Autocomplete Fixed: April 2, 2014

Result: This is the fastest I’ve ever seen Google autocomplete fixed. Now, we’re getting to work with maintenance to ensure that the suggestions remain fixed.

It does not matter whether your need your Google suggestions corrected locally or all over the country. Whether you are an individual or a brand, we can help you. We do quality work, track every single search we perform and get results. Call 503-890-6663 for a fast, confidential quote. We can begin work on your situation immediately.