You probably use Google for your searches on a daily basis, whether personal or related to your business activity. But are you sure you’re harnessing the full potential of the world’s largest search engine, especially for your marketing intelligence?
Today, we’re going to look at how Google search operators can help you track your competition and the topics that matter to you so that you can get the inspiration you need for your marketing materials.
“site” operator
The most basic of all Google operators is “Site”. Placing it next to the name of the site of your choice, you’ll only see pages from that site in search results: it’s very useful to look up a competitor’s publications, for example. You can also use it to find out how many pages are indexed on a site.
Regardless of the operator used, be careful not to put a space before or after the “:”. Otherwise, the search engine will not be able to identify the operator and the search will not be successful.
To make the search as broad as possible, enter the domain name directly without the “www” upstream. Otherwise, you run the risk of exclusion of linked pages from the subdomain and thus limiting your search.
However, if the site in question is large, you will still get a very long list of results (for example, over 800,000 for lemonday.fr). That’s why it would be interesting to introduce other search commands.
“intitled” operator
The “intitle” operator allows you to specify that a search term should be in the title of the page. This is particularly useful for monitoring web pages on a specific topic or topic. For example :
Only pages that include “Marketing” in the title are visible.
By way of comparison, the search “marketing” (without the word “intitle”) returns 1,760,000,000 results: this operator therefore makes it possible to refine your search substantially. But, on the many terms used, the list of consequences can be very long. It is possible to do even better by specifying other conditions.
To do this, you’ll need to use another, slightly different operator. Then think about the “elintitle” command, which has the same utility as the previous one, except it allows you to enter multiple search terms at the same time:
If you want to know what a particular site has published on a specific topic, it is possible to combine the two operators (eg “entitled” and “site”):
Thus you can get very good results (440 in our example) for only searching the relevant pages.
“course” operator
Like the title, “intext” is used to select pages that contain a search term in their body text.
Caution: This is an operator that is less relevant to a search that is intended to be very precise. Still, it’s good to know it exists.
It also has a variant (“linetext”) that allows you to search for multiple words:
Finally, it can also be combined with “site” for greater accuracy:
Quotation mark
If you’re looking for a phrase and want to know which pages use the same phrase (with the same word order, etc.), quotes are the best solution:
“before” and “after” operators
These operators are useful to get the result based on their release date.
- To find a match before a specific date, use the “before” operator.
- To find a page published after the date entered, you must use “after”.
For example, if you want to find a page published by the Le Monde site before February 2021, here is the search you should type: “site:lemonde.fr after:02-2021”.
If you choose to indicate an absolute date, you must separate the elements with hyphens. For Google to understand your search, the date must appear in the following format: DD-MM-YYYY.
You do not need to fill in the full date. You can enter only year or month and year.
+ and – operators
The + and – operators have inclusion and exclusion functions, respectively. Thus, by adding a “+” in front of a word, the latter will be present on the following pages in the result:
Conversely, adding “-” will exclude results containing the word:
The two operators can certainly be combined with (and with others) each other.
“file type” operator
To target a particular type of document, “file type” is the ideal operator. For example, if you’re looking for the results of a study or report, you have a good chance that the document will be in PDF format. Thus, in Google, fill in: “file type: pdf”.
You can use this operator to search multiple file types. Here are some examples for this:
- an image: file type: png, file type: jpeg, file type: svg
- A Powerpoint Presentation: File Type: PPT
- an excel table: file type: xls
“related” operator
The last operator to know is “belongs”. This allows you to display sites similar to any site you like: ideal for taking a look at your competitors or sites that publish pages on the same theme as you.
read also 7 Search Operators to Boost Your SEO
conclusion
You get it: Using Google operators allows you to target and refine your search. The key: saving time, more relevant results and more efficient monitoring.
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