The Internet made us live virtual and shift our businesses from a physical location to a virtual one. Nowadays, everyone (either big or small) has a website. Of course, their niche can be different, but we are making our virtual presence more and more compelling at the end of the day.
Hold on a minute. Is this one of those articles where fancy complex terminologies are used? Oh please, if you people that bringing customers to a website is an easy task, then my friend, that’s wrong.
Though this might seem to be a techy kind of article, hey, you have me to make it easy for you to understand.
Let me tell you the harsh reality. Onboarding new customer, spreading your business footprint, and the need to be known requires a lot of work.
If you are not up for that, then this article will not do any magic for you.
If you are still reading this, it means you are interested, and you are ready to get your hands dirty to attract new customers. So without wasting your time, let’s get started and understand what else you can do and ranking first to be known/ famous around.
There are many ways, and being ranked at number is not the only option. So yes, ranking and SEO help, but what else we can do.
SEO is a tool that enables you to let your business be found by people interested in products and services provided by you specifically.
But what if I tell you that SEO can do more than that? Curious, aren’t you? It can still help you even when your site is not being ranked.
How you ask. And I present you Google Search Options. In layman terms, these are targeted words that can also be referred to as specialized characters.
These targeted words, specialized characters, or advanced operators help you extending your virtual presence to highly sophisticated clients who prefer specific searches than roaming around on the Internet.
These specific, highly target-oriented people are your actual buyers. They come in waste no time and choose the product, pay, and leave. Easy peasy.
Let me amuse you by quoting some statistics about using search operators. 37%of e-commerce businesses reported in 2014 that they were using search operators to increase sales.
By now, you are familiar with the working mechanics of Search Operations. But to implement it on your website, we need to dig a little deeper.
Types of Search Operators
Search operators can be divided into two types. Basic and Advance. Let’s see the basic search operators first and see how we can use them.
Basic search operators
Basic search operators help in modifying default standard search. They consist of words and symbols, i.e., “, OR, |, (), -, *, .., in, $, €. Google has predefined all these symbols and purposes. These basic search operators generate highly optimized targeted results when used.
In short, these basic search operators help the user to filter and get the results as they want to from your website.
And now, we will be discussing relatively complex but highly targeted search operators. These are called advanced search operators.
Advanced search operators
There are 11 types of advance search operators, which we are going to talk about today. Google has designed these operators to make your website easy to find by the customers.
This increased SEO with the help of advanced search operators will make you do wonders in your business.
Following is the list of 11 advance search operators, and then we will be discussing each one of them with examples for your understanding.
- site
- source
- intext
- allintext
- Title
- allintitle
- inurl
- allinurl
- Related
- Around
Please remember this; these operators should be used as written. Any change in syntax will result in invalid or incorrect feedback. So you have to use these advanced search operators as they have been mentioned above.
The first identifier we will be talking about is site.
- Site: This crazy operator restricts or limits your search spectrum to only one site.
- When used as mentioned in the following example, it doesn’t let you roam around all over the Internet.
- When you allow this operator in SEO of your website, it lets your customer move in your website and shows all your indexed pages
- It helps you find one type of product from a specific website only and don’t have to look for other similar products.
- Source: This is the second, advanced search operator. It is almost the same as Site Operator with only one difference: it works for news only.
It means that if you want to look for some product and you want to see if there is any news related to that product specifications, then go to the google news tab and use the source operator as used in the following example.
- It is used for specific news searching.
- Check up on quotes mentioned about that product
- Let’s read any gossip available related to that product.
- Intext: This search operator allows Google to understand the specific text you want to find published on the Internet. This operator skips headings and quotations, but if it finds the text you have entered anywhere on the Internet, it will load that source page.
- allintext: allintext is similar to intext, with only one difference. allintext finds the exact match of your query in web pages and publishes only those results with the same text as searched by you. allintexthelps you to find:
- Exact quotes
- Exact examples
- 100% accurate results.
- Title: Just like intext, we can use intitle to ensure only those results which contain pages including the words you are searching in Meta title tags. Intitle advanced search operation effectively makes you understand the number of pages this specific search will come up with.
The title helps you find:
- Quality check of keywords
- And competitiveness of keywords
- Opportunity of backlink
- allintitle: allintitle ensures that every word in the query is available in the Meta tag of all the pages shown in the query result. Following is the classic example of searching for air pods.
Imagine that you sell air pods; in this case, the allintitle operator helps you find all the websites with air pods in their Meta tags. allintitle helps you find:
- This will let you find your competitor and change your marketing strategy.
- Let’s evaluate long-tail keywords.
- inurl: Following the functionality mechanics of intitle &intext, Google further helps you with the inurl advance search option, which returns results where query phrases exist in the website address. This will often drastically reduce search volume and can be handy for finding potential direct competitors.
inurl helps you find
- Selective search results and your query response is faster.
- Let’s find your competitor quickly.
- Find any 404 errors and backlink failures.
- allinurl: Similar to the Inurl, the allinurlsearch includes all the words from the search that should come in the result. However, this is not suitable for long phrases as it fails to match them and returns zero or very few results.
allinurl helps you find
- Specific websites with the exact search phrase.
- It helps you find the broken links.
- Filetype: By simply add the required file extension type pdf, Docx, xlsx, you will get to find the exact research published or papers written or documents uploaded on the Internet.
- Related: This operator helps you look up websites related to a specified URL you have pasted for search. If you want to see Google has ranked your website compared to your competitor, you should be using this search option a little more often.
- AROUND(X): if you saw some website and don’t remember the exact web link, around(), a search operator can help you find it. However, it returns not exactly what weblink contains similar information as you are looking for.
Bottom line
I hope I have elaborated on the advance search operators in the simplest ways and made learning advance search operators easy for you. In continuation of SEO, you need to work on Advance Search Operators to be searchable and identifiable for those users who like to target shopping.
These search operators result in the sale increase for most of the e-commerce websites. Therefore, I am sure that now you are convinced to use advanced search operators. Furthermore, I am sure you will be shifting your emphasis on search operators as much as you do on top-ranking SERP.
What are you waiting for? Let’s go and check your web performance?
