You probably use Google every day for searches, whether personal or related to your professional activities. But are you sure you’re taking full advantage of the world’s largest search engine, especially for your marketing monitoring?
Today we’ll look at how Google search operators can help you monitor competitors and topics you care about, so you can draw inspiration for your marketing content.
The “site” operator
The most basic Google operator is “site”. Placing it before the name of any site shows only pages from that same site in the search results: it’s therefore very useful for viewing a competitor’s posts, for example. You can also use it to see how many pages from a site are indexed.
Whatever operator you use, make sure not to put a space either before or after the colon. Otherwise the search engine won’t recognize the operator and the search will fail.
To make the search as broad as possible, enter the domain name directly, without “www” at the start. Otherwise you may exclude pages on subdomains and unintentionally narrow your search.
However, if the site in question is large, you’ll still end up with a very long list of results to sift through (over 800,000 for lemonde.fr, for example). That’s why it can be useful to add other search commands.
The “intitle” operator
The “intitle” operator lets you specify that a search term must appear in the page title. It’s especially useful for monitoring web pages on a particular theme or topic. For example:
Only pages whose title contains “marketing” will appear.
By comparison, the search “marketing” (without the word “intitle”) returns 1,760,000,000 results: this operator therefore greatly refines your search. But for very common terms, the results list can still be very long. You can do even better by specifying additional terms.
To do that you’ll need to use a slightly different operator. Consider the “allintitle” command, which serves the same purpose as the previous one but lets you include several search terms at once:
If you want to know what a particular site has published on a specific subject, you can combine two operators (for example “intitle” and “site”):
This way you can get very precise results (440 in our example), showing only relevant pages.
The “intext” operator
Like intitle, “intext” lets you select pages that contain a search term within their body text.
Note: This operator is less useful for very precise searches. Nevertheless, it’s good to know that it exists.
It also has a variant ("allintext") that lets you search for multiple words:
Finally, it can also be combined with "site" for greater precision:
Quotation marks
If you're searching for a phrase and want to know which pages use exactly the same sentence (with the same word order, etc.), quotation marks are the best solution:
The “before” and “after” operators
These operators are useful for obtaining results based on their publication date.
- To find a match before a specific date, use the “before” operator.
- To find a page published after the listed date, you will need to use “after”.
As an example, if you want to find a page published by the site Le Monde before February 2021, here is the search you will need to type: "site:lemonde.fr after:02-2021".
If you choose to provide a full date, you must separate the elements with hyphens. For Google to understand your query, the date must appear in the following format: DD-MM-YYYY.
You are not required to provide the complete date. You can provide only the year or the month and year.
The + and − operators
The operators + and - have inclusion and exclusion functions, respectively. Thus, by adding "+" before a word, that word will be present on the pages shown in the results:
Conversely, by adding "-", results containing the word will be excluded:
The two operators can, of course, be combined with each other (and with others).
The “filetype” operator
To target a specific document type, "filetype" is the ideal operator. For example, if you are looking for the results of a study or a report, there is a good chance the document will be in PDF format. Thus, in Google, enter: "filetype:pdf".
You can use this operator to search for several file types. Here are some examples for:
- An image: filetype:png, filetype:jpeg, filetype:svg
- A PowerPoint presentation: filetype:ppt
- An Excel spreadsheet: filetype:xls
The “related” operator
The last operator to know is "related." It lets you display sites similar to any site of your choice: ideal for getting an overview of your competitors or sites that publish pages on the same topics as you.
Also read : 7 search operators to boost your SEO
Conclusion
As you will have understood: using Google operators lets you target and refine your search. The benefit: time saved, more relevant results, and more effective monitoring.
You can also choose to entrust your marketing monitoring to freelance professionals on Codeur.com.
