Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk and Tea.
Today's conversation are What Are Search Operators and How Are They Helpful? Search operators are a really old school method of research, researching, you know, search engines on your competition, that I think that a lot of people don't take advantage of, they rely on softwares, but I definitely think search operators are very important. I use them heavily in my research in day to day, so we're going to walk through what they are and how they're important. But of course, we're going to want to introduce the tea, because this is Zupo's SEO Talk and Tea, right? So we have a tea station Qimen black tea, it's also in Chinese called [Chinese 00:00:42], which means red tea. So I don't know why black tea is translated to black tea when in Chinese it's red tea, but I'm not here to debate that. That's a whole nother video that I have, know nothing about. But this is a black tea that I bought, I think like four or five years ago, back when I used to make a lot of Boba in my house, and I used to work for different Boba shops, and I really liked this black tea.
Well, let's go ahead and let's get brewing, and talking about what a search operator is and how it's helpful. So what a search operator is, is there are searches you can do on Google search that manipulate the search engine results, that kind of do a finer tuned, filtered down version of a search. So it's not something that's manipulative, or it's not something that, it's not against the rules. It actually is something that Google publicly publishes, that you can use. The best example I can use is when you were in elementary school or high school, sometimes in the library, you can use different filters when you're searching for a book, and that would return certain levels of books.
So the most common version of a search operator that you've probably used is, Hey, can you filter the results down to the last year? That's a really common one a lot of people will use, or like the time variation. And those, that's one that you don't even really need to do as a search operator, it's a search setting that you could just, you know, use under the Google search bar. But what I'm specifically talking about is there are things that you can type into Google and that specifically tell it what to look for. So the most common one I use today is the site search operator. The site search operator is, let's just use my own website as an example. If you want to do a site search operator of my site, you would just put site, S, I, T, E colon, so two dots, zupo.co, Z U P O.co, and don't put a space between the colon and the domain. I'm not sure if it matters, but I'm pretty sure it does, so don't put a space, but again, site:zupo.co which is my website. You can put whatever website the heck you want. It doesn't really matter, but just put the domain after.
What that site search operator says is, I only want to see pages that Google has indexed of this website. Therefore, on a much more basic level it just means, Please only return results from this website, right? And why that's valuable is, it's not as valuable, I guess, for your own site, but it's very valuable when you're looking at doing it for your own site compared to your competitors. What I often like to do is like to see how many pages our competitors have that are indexed by Google, and how many pages that we have. That generally gives me a good idea of the site library that we have and site thoroughness we have in terms of content, compared to our competitors.
So another example of a search operator I also like to use is intitle. So it's I, N, T, I, T, L, E, intitle, all one word, intitle, colon, whatever word you want. So let's use the Zupo example again, let's say I did site, S, I, T, E, colon zupo.co, that tells Google only return pages that are on zupo.co that you have indexed. And then second I put intitle:, let's just put SEO. That would tell Google, of this website zupo.co, please return all the pages that have the word SEO in its title. Therefore, you could restrict the site search to say, Okay, I'm looking at only this site, but I only want to see the pages that are devoted to SEO. And so the reason why that's important then is because then you can, like, you could find all the pages involving this topic, or you can kind of see, like, you can do take it any other way, but in that specific case, I could just be able to see, Hey, you know, this is a Zupo website, what are all the SEO pages and how many do they have?
So those are two common sites search operators, and as you probably have guessed while I was explaining that, you can use two together, they don't need to be one by one. So in that case, the site search operator with zupo.co and the intitle search operator were used in tandem. And you can use I believe as many as you like, I have search operators that have like five put together, right? So what I would, what I like to do with these, is these are great ways to investigate real quickly, your competitors and their content profiles, and your own site on the content profile. Because what I talk about, a lot about in these videos is, you know, taking your research and your strategies into niches or specific products and services.
I always mention this in these videos, your business probably sells more than one product. That means you have multiple product pages and multiple services, that means you have multiple keyword groups you're trying to optimize for. When you are competing with other people, sometimes your competitors are making for certain products, also have their own variety of products that don't really match the ones you're trying to sell, so maybe you're only competing down to one product, right? In that case what you would, could use with the exact site search operator and those intitle search operators, Hey, let's return to my website. How many pages do we have devoted to this topic, and how many does our competitor? If they have 10 and we have one, we obviously are lacking. We need to kind of build up our own content library for that specific keyword, right?
So there's a lot of different sites search operators. The one I like to use the most, I believe is from Moz. Dr. Pete, I've actually met Dr. Pete at MozCon. He's a great guy. I've seen him speak, I've actually tweeted back and forth with him, he's been very helpful. And also he's a big player at MozCon. He does a great job on one of his posts about listing all the site search operators you can use. I would reference that and kind of test it out myself. I generally have my go-to four or five site search of operators that I use, but it really depends on the type of research you're doing and the kind of, you know, sites you're looking at. But site search operators helps circumvent the need for like really sophisticated softwares. You're using Google's exact search engine, you can see what they have indexed, and therefore you can kind of just use the Google search bar as a really awesome research tool. And like I said, I use this very heavily in my own research with my own clients. So it is, it is not like a shortcut or a weaker version, I definitely use it very heavily and I really suggest it for other people.
So again, I've only gone through two site search operators, there's many other ones that include like intext or inURL. But I would really read the Dr. Pete post, I believe ahrefs also has another post, I kind of use both of them. Read both of them and you'll get a really thorough understanding of, you know, all of the search operators and how you can use them. But I hope you guys will, you know, are able to use that. I hope you guys found this video valuable. If you liked what you saw, please like and subscribe. I'm going to pour this black tea out. Whenever I pour this black tea, it makes me just want Boba, but that's beside the point. I'm going to drink this black tea now, guys. And I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks.