10 Essential Google Search Tips (ASO) you MUST know.
Knowing a handful of Google Search Tips can help you immensely. Being the world’s most powerful search engine it may seem great already, yet knowing a few tricks never hurts. They are called Advanced Search Operators (ASO). They will level up your searching game and help you find your desire content without wasting time. Especially for Digital Marketers, they are a must to know for finding specific content, whether for SEO or site audit.
You may be wondering already what are those google search tips and how to use them? Well, don’t stress as they are easier than you may think. Usually, you need to insert the search operator with colon and type your specific keywords that you are trying to find. Some might vary but we are going to look at some important ones and know how to use them properly.
1. Site:
This helps you restrict your result from a specific site or domain TLD that you mention. For instance, if you type courses site:Edu then it’s going to show you the result for courses from .edu domains only. You can also try to find the result from a specific site such as ram site:amazon.com shows all the ram results from amazon.com.
From the SEO aspect, this is also crucial to help you find out indexed pages from a specific site. See a simple search reveals 35,700 results for semrush.com.
2. Inurl:
This operator helps you find the pages with URLs that contain the keyword you type in google search. For instance, If you search for inurl:ram
you are going to find all the pages that have the word “ram” in their URL. It gets more interesting if you type inurl:ram site:amazon.com then it is going to show you the pages from amazon.com only that have “ram” in their URL.
3. Allinurl:
Allinurl is similar to the inurl search operator. The difference here is that it displays search results for All the specified words in the URL. That means a URL must have the query words to be in the search result. For long-tail phrases, this might not show many results or sometimes none. One thing to note, search engine algorithms are updated on a daily basis so there is always a chance that alters how it usually behaves.
4. Intitle:
This will give you results that contain your specific query word in their title meta tag. For example, if you search for intitle:seo you are going to see all the pages that have “seo” in their title. A quick tip, remember to change search setting to show more results displaying in the SERP if you ever feel tiring to navigate pages.
5. Allintitle:
It’s almost similar to the intitle search operator. The difference here is that it will show only results that have All the specified words in their title.
For example, allintitle:seo guide will only show results containing both words “seo” and “guide” in their title. You can use this search operator to analyse your direct competitors too.
6. Allintext:
This search operator shows you only the results containing the specified words anywhere on the body of the page. It might be helpful if you ever searching for quotes.
7. “search term”
This is a very simple one but effective. You use the quotation mark to force google search engine to show exact matches. It helps you exclude synonyms from the search results too. For example “black shoe”.
8. -search term
This dash or minus, whichever you like to call it, excludes the specified term from the search results. It helps google search engine to understand the meaning of your query to refine your search and display proper results. For example,
jobs -apple will show results only related to jobs excluding anything related to the term apple.
9. Filetype:
Well, this one must be easy to guess. Yes, you are right, it helps you find a specific file type from your search results. It’s often helpful to find documents. For example, seo guide filetype:pdf
A quick tip here, remember to use the search filter to refine your result more; for instance, if you are searching for an SEO guide ebook, you probably want to make sure it’s a guide that has been updated or published recently. Bytheway ext: also works the same such as seo guide ext:pdf
10. Cache:
Now, this is the last one in the list and probably more valuable to digital marketers or SEO professionals. It will show you the most recent cached version of a web page in google index (considering the page is indexed). For instance search cache:apple.com
There are many advanced search operators or search cards that I could have included in Google search tips but I only mentioned the ones I feel extremely important. Google has deprecated many other advanced search operators in recent years. In case, you are keen for more, here is a nice post from Spyfu that I can Link for you to read.
