Posted by Dr-Pete

Any SEO worth their sustainably harvested pink Himalayan salt knows that Google offers a variety of advanced search operators – special commands that take you above and beyond regular text searches. Learning search operators is a bit like learning chess, though. It’s easy to memorize how each piece moves, but that’s about 1% of your path toward mastery. I know that the pointy-hat guy in chess moves diagonally, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to take on Kasparov or Deep Blue.

Instead of just listing all of the operators and telling you what they do, I’d like to try something different. This post is a journey in 67 parts, split into five functional stories:

1. Content Research
2. Title Research
3. Plagiarism Check
4. Competitive Research
5. Technical SEO/Audits

You can skip around, but I’d suggest following the story from the beginning. When you’re done, you’ll understand not only what each operator does, but how to use it in real-world situations and mix-and-match it with other useful operators.

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I. Content Research

Crafting original content in 2017 requires wading into the sea of content that’s already been created, and Google remains the most complete map of that sea. Advanced search operators are invaluable research tools for content marketers. Let’s walk through a sample content journey…

1. Find all the content

tesla

Let’s say you’ve got a blog post to write about the inventor Nikola Tesla. You hop over to Google and search “tesla,” only to find a lot of results like this:

Google has decided that Tesla Motors is the dominant intent for this phrase, which doesn’t help you very much for your current project.

2. Narrow your search

nikola tesla

So, of course you add more keywords and narrow your search. Now you’re on the right track:

Anyone who’s ever run a Google search understands this, but there’s an important point here that we often overlook. Whenever you string together more than one word in a Google search, Google connects them with a logical AND. This is true of both keywords and operators. If you combine operators, Google will assume that you meant AND and will try to meet all conditions.

3. Mind special characters

tesla ac/dc

Let’s say you want to specifically find pages with the phrase “ac/dc”, so you try the search above:

Notice the highlighted words – Google has returned anything matching “AC” and “DC” separately. In this case, they’ve treated the forward slash as the same as a space, which probably isn’t what you intended.

4. Force exact match with quotes

tesla “ac/dc”

By putting quotation marks around a phrase, you can force an exact-match search. This requires Google to match the specific, full phrase – with all terms and in the order specified:

This is a lot closer to what you probably expected. Notice the highlighting in the second result, where Google seems to have matched “AC-DC”. This is a lot closer than the previous attempt, but Google is still taking some liberties with the forward slash. Be sure to do a sanity check of results any time you use non-alphanumeric characters in a search.

5. Force a logical OR

tesla OR edison

If you specifically want a logical OR between keywords or operators, use the “OR” operator. OR must be in all-caps, or, alternatively you can use the pipe symbol (|):

Note that, in most cases, Google is still going to give priority to results that contain both terms. Specifying logical OR is most useful when two terms only co-occur rarely.

6. Group terms with parentheses

(tesla OR edison) alternating current

Some operators, including OR, are more useful in complex searches. Here, we’re using parentheses to group “tesla OR edison” and then are adding “alternating current” as an AND condition:

Requiring all three terms might be unnecessarily restrictive. By using both ANDs and ORs in the same search, we’re giving Google a bit more flexibility. Since you probably don’t want to memorize the precedence of all Google search operators, I highly recommend using parentheses whenever you’re in doubt.

7. Exclude specific terms

tesla -motors

Maybe you want to know what other uses of “tesla” are out there, beyond Tesla Motors. You could use the (-) operator to tell Google to exclude any result with “motors” in it:

Browsing these results, you can see quickly that Tesla is also a band and a unit of measurement. In addition, Tesla the company makes products other than cars. Keyword exclusions are also called “negative keywords” (thus the minus sign).

8. Exclude multiple terms

tesla -motors -car -battery

Just like positive keywords, you can chain together negative keywords:

Keep in mind that each minus sign should only be paired with a single keyword or operator.

9. Exclude exact-match phrases

tesla -motors -“rock n roll”

You can exclude full phrases by using the (-) sign followed by the phrase in quotes:

You can combine individual negative keywords with negative exact-match phrases as needed.

10. Match broadly with wildcards

tesla -motors “rock * roll”

What if you specifically wanted to include more about the rock-n-roll band, but you didn’t care whether it was spelled “rock-n-roll,” “rock and roll,” or “rock & roll,” etc.? You can use the asterisk (*) operator as a wildcard to replace any single word:

Wildcards behave most predictably within an exact-match phrase, allowing you to find near-matches when you can’t pin down your search to a single phrase. The (*) operator only operates on the word level. There is no single-character wildcard operator.

11. Find terms near each other

tesla AROUND(3) edison

Here’s a nifty one. Maybe you want to find results where “Tesla” and “Edison” not only appear in the document but are fairly close to each other. The AROUND(X) operator tells Google to only return results where the two words are within X words of each other:

Phrases like “Tesla vs. Thomas Edison” show up as matches, but an article where the two men were mentioned in separate paragraphs wouldn’t.

12. Find near exact-match phrases

“nikola tesla” AROUND(2) “thomas alva edison”

What if, for some reason, you really needed references to include full names? You can combine AROUND(X) with exact-match phrases (in quotes):

AROUND(X) only works on the entities immediately preceding and following it, so be careful when combining it with other operators or phrases that aren’t exact-match. Note that AROUND(0) returns strange results – if you want to return two words only if they appear together, use an exact-match phrase instead.

13. Find content on specific sites

nikola tesla site:pbs.org

The “site:” operator is an advanced command that lets you specify a specific domain you want to search on. We usually think of it as a technical SEO and audit tool, but it can also help you refine content searches. Let’s say you remembered reading an article on PBS about Tesla, but lost the URL:

Typically, you’ll use “site:” with a root domain (i.e. leave subdomains, like “www”, off) to match as broadly as possible. Advanced operators like “site:” can be combined with each other and with keywords.

14. Find content on specific TLDs

nikola tesla site:edu

You don’t have to include a full domain with “site:”. For example, let’s say you wanted to find any content about Nikola Tesla on a university website. You could search on all “.edu” domains (also known as a Top-Level Domain, or TLD):

The “site:” operator will not work on a partial domain name. It only accepts full domains, root domains, or TLDs. You can use it on country-specific TLDs (ccTLDs), such as “co.uk” or “com.sg”.

15. Find content on multiple TLDs

nikola tesla (site:gov OR site:edu)

Just as with keywords, you can combine “site:” operators with logical OR to search multiple domains:

Often, it’s easier and a bit less confusing to run individual searches, but this example is just to illustrate that you can combine advanced operators in complex ways.

16. Dealing with broad matches

discount airfare

Google is getting better at matching synonyms, which is usually good thing, but it sometimes means that results are a lot broader than you might have expected:

Here, a search for “discount airfare” is returning keywords like “cheapest flights,” “cheap flights,” “airfare deals,” and a variety of other combinations.

17. Use exact-match to block synonyms

“discount airfare”

This is another situation where exact-match can help. It doesn’t just tell Google to use the full phrase, but it blocks Google from returning any kind of broad match, including synonyms:

Obviously, the results may still contain synonyms (naturally written content often does), but using exact-match ensures that there will be at least one instance of “discount airfare” in each of the results you get back.

18. Exact-match on a single word

discount “airfare”

This may seem counter-intuitive, but you can apply exact match to just one word. In this case, putting an exact match on “airfare” blocks Google from using synonyms just for that word:

Here, Google is free to match on synonyms for “discount” (such as “cheapest”), but every result is forced to include “airfare.” Exact-match single words when you want to exclude variations of that word.

19. What to do when exact-match fails

“orbi vs eero vs google wifi”

The other day, I was searching for articles that specifically compared Orbi, Eero, and Google Wifi networking hardware. Something odd happened when I searched on the exact-match phrase:

It’s not obvious from the search results themselves, but the first result doesn’t contain the phrase anywhere in the body of the text. On rare occasion, Google may match a phrase on secondary relevance factors, such as inbound link anchor text.

20. Search only in the body text

intext:”orbi vs eero vs google wifi”

In these rare cases, you can use the “intext:” operator. This forces Google to find the text in the body of the document. Now, all of the top results clearly have an exact match in the content itself:

Interestingly, the second result reveals what happened with our last search. A Reddit post featured an article from The Verge with an alternate title and used that title as the anchor text. Reddit apparently had enough authority to generate a match via the anchor text alone.

21. Find a set of keywords in the text

allintext: orbi eero google wifi

What if you want to find a set of words, but they don’t need to be in an exact-match phrase? You could use a separate “intext:” operator for each word, or you could use “allintext:” which tells Google to apply “intext:” to all of the words following the operator:

All of the results have the target keywords in the body text, in some combination or order. Be very careful about mixing “allintext:” (or any “allin…:” operator) with other commands, or you could end up with unexpected results. The “allintext:” operator will automatically try to process anything that follows it.

(Special thanks to Michael Martinez for working through some “intext:” examples with me on Twitter, and to Google’s Gary Illyes for clarifying some of the details about how exactly “intext:” works)

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II. Title Research

You’ve done your content research, and now it’s time to pin down a title. You want to capture those clicks, but, of course, you don’t want to be unoriginal. Here are some search operator combos for title research.

22. Check for a specific phrase

“tesla vs edison”

You’ve settled on using “Tesla vs. Edison” in your title, so let’s do a quick check on content with that exact-match phrase:

You’ve pinned down Google to an exact-match phrase, but that phrase can occur anywhere in the text. How do we look for it in just the document title?

23. Check for a phrase in the title

intitle:”tesla vs edison”

Use the “intitle:” operator to specify that a keyword or phrase (in quotes) has to occur in the document title:

Be aware that sometimes Google may rewrite a display title in search results, so it’s possible to get a result back where the phrase doesn’t seem to match the title because Google has rewritten it.

24. Check multiple keywords in title

intitle:tesla intitle:vs intitle:edison

If you want to check for multiple keywords in a title, but don’t want to restrict yourself to exact-match, you can string together multiple “intitle:” operators with single keywords:

Of course, this can be a bit clunky. Luckily, there’s an easier way…

25. Check multiple keywords easily

allintitle: tesla vs edison

Like “allintext:”, there’s an “allintitle:” operator. It will match any of the keywords following it:

This returns roughly the same results as #24, which doesn’t make for a very interesting screenshot, but is exactly what we want it to do. Again, be careful combining “allintitle:” with other operators, as it will try to consume everything following it.

26. Check for titles with lists

intitle:”top 10 facts” tesla

Maybe you’ve got your heart set on a listicle, but you want to make sure it hasn’t been done to death. You can combine an “intitle:” operator with a general keyword search on a topic:

These results are all pages that talk about Tesla but have “Top 10 Facts” in the title.

27. Find lists and exact-match phrases

intitle:”top 10 facts” “nikola tesla”

Oops, we ‘re pulling in results about Tesla Motors again. Luckily, you can combine “intitle:” with exact-match phrases and other, more complex operator combos:

This is much closer to what you probably had in mind, but the bad news is that the “Top 10” things does seem like it’s been overdone, even in the realm of Nikola Tesla.

28. Check for Top X lists

intitle:”top 7..9 facts” “nikola tesla”

The range (..) operator lets you search for a specific range of numbers. Maybe you’re tired of Top 10, but don’t want too short of a list. Let’s check out what Top 7, 8, and 9 lists are out there:

This returned only four results, and they were all videos. So, at least you’re on the right track, originality-wise. Once you master search operators, you’ll eventually reach the mythical end of the Internet.

29. Check the title for this post

intitle:”search operators” “in * easy steps”

Let’s put all of this to the test – how original is my title for this post? I’m not expecting an exact match to a post with 67 steps, but what about any post mentioning “Search Operators” in the title that also uses some variation of “in * easy steps” anywhere in the result?

It looks like I did alright, from an originality standpoint. Of course, there are many ways to mix-and-match operators to find similar titles. Ultimately, you have to decide how you define “unique.”

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III. Plagiarism Check

You’ve finally published that article, but you suspect someone else may have copied it and is taking your traffic. Advanced search operators can be great for hunting down plagiarism.

30. Find articles with your exact title

intitle:”duplicate content in a post-panda world”

Use the “intitle:” operator with your exact-match title to easily spot whether someone has copied your entire article with no modifications. Here’s a search based on a post I wrote a couple of years back:

Ok, you probably didn’t need to know about the original article, so let’s try again…

31. Find title matches, excluding sites

intitle:”duplicate content in a post-panda world” -site:moz.com

Use (-) with the “site:” operator to exclude specific sites. In this case, we already know that the original title was posted on Moz.com:

It turns out that two of these sites are just linking to the post in kind of a low-quality but not outright malicious way. What you really want to know if someone is copying the text wholesale…

32. Find unique, exact-match text

“they were frolicking in our entrails” -site:moz.com

Another alternative is to run exact-match on a long, unique phrase. Luckily, this particular blog post has some pretty unique phrases. I’m going to keep the Moz.com exclusion:

The first result is a harmless (if slightly odd) Facebook post, but the other two are full, copied-and-pasted duplicates of the original post.

33. Find unique text only in the body

intext:”they were frolicking in our entrails” -site:moz.com -site:facebook.com

If you want to be completely sure that the unique text is in the body of the document, you can use the “intext:” operator. Here, I’ve added both “intext:” and a Facebook exclusion. Within reason, it’s ok to mix-and-match a variety of operators:

Practically speaking, “intext:” often returns similar results to the exact-match phrase by itself. I typically use “intext:” only when I’m seeing strange results or want to make absolutely sure that I’m only looking at document body text.

34. Find a quote you’re not sure about

i would rather kiss a wookiee

What if you’re looking for a long quote, but you can’t remember if you’re getting that quote quite right? We often equate exact-match with long searches, but sometimes it’s better to let Google go broad:

Here, Google is helpfully reminding me that I’m a lousy Star Wars fan. I’ve even got an article about all the other people who are wrong about this, too.

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IV. Competitive Research

In some cases, your research may be very focused on what kind of content the competition is creating. Google search operators can help you easily narrow down what your competitors are up to…

35. Start with a basic search

tesla announcements

Let’s say you want to find out who’s publishing Tesla Motors announcements, so you start with the simplest query you can think of:

You’re probably not looking for Tesla’s own announcements, so you do an exclusion…

36. Exclude obvious sites

tesla announcements -site:tesla.com

You grab the handy “site:” operator and run a negative (-) on Tesla’s own site, resulting in:

That’s a little better. These are all pretty familiar competitors if you’re in the news game.

37. Target specific competitors

tesla announcements site:nytimes.com

Maybe you want to focus on just one competitor. You can use the “site:” operator for that, too:

Obviously, this approach is going to work best for large competitors with a high volume of content.

38. Target a specific subdomain

tesla announcements site:wheels.blogs.nytimes.com

Remember that you can use “site:” with a full subdomain. Maybe you just want to find out what CNN’s “Wheels” auto industry blog is posting about.

You can, of course, exclude specific subdomains with “-site:” as well.

39. Target a specific author on a site

tesla announcements site:nytimes.com “neal e boudette”

Maybe you’re interested in just a single author. There’s no reliable author search operator for organic results, but in most cases, just including the author’s name as exact-match text will do the trick:

Make sure to pull up an article first to see how the author’s name is presented (middle initial, etc.).

40. Target by keywords, site, and title

tesla announcements site:nytimes.com intitle:earnings

If you wanted Tesla announcements in the New York Times that only mention “Earnings” in the title, then you can mix-and-match operators as needed:

Don’t be afraid to get creative. The Google index is a big, big place and there’s always more to be found, especially on very large sites.

41. Find related competitors

related:nytimes.com

What if you wanted to branch out to other publications? By using the “related:” operator with a root domain, Google will show you other sites/domains like the one you specify:

The “related:” operator is great when it works, but be warned that it only works for certain niches and typically for larger sites. It’s also one of the rare Google search operators that can’t be combined with other operators.

42. Find content in a specific path

tesla announcements site:fortune.com/2016

If you want to drill down into a site, you can specify URL folders with the “site:” operator. Forbes, for example, is conveniently organized with year-based folders, so you can easily see just articles from 2016:

Keep in mind that this only works for parts of the URL directly following the domain name. So, how do you search on text in other parts of the URL?

43. Search broadly for a “folder”

tesla announcements inurl:2016

Luckily, Google also has an “inurl:” operator. By searching on a year, for example, you can find that year anywhere it happens to appear in the result URL:

Keep in mind that the text you specify “inurl:” can appear anywhere in the URL, not just at the folder level.

44. Search by a specific date range

tesla announcements daterange:2457663-2457754

What if you really want to narrow down your date range? Google also has a “daterange:” operator which lets you pinpoint publication dates to the day, in theory. For example, here’s a search for Q4 of 2016:

Unfortunately, in regular organic results, publication dates aren’t always accurate, and “daterange:” can, in practice, return some pretty strange results. You may have noticed, too, that that’s not your typical date format. The “daterange:” operator uses the Julian date format.

45. Search by broad date range

tesla announcement 2015..2017

If you don’t need your date range to be particularly precise, consider using the range (..) operator with a year on either side of it. As numbers go, years are generally unique enough to return reasonable results:

Please note that this is not specifically a date search, but as cheats go, it’s not a bad one. Unfortunately, the range operator doesn’t always work properly paired with “inurl:” and other advanced operators.

46. Target just one type of file

tesla announcements filetype:pdf

The “filetype:” operator lets you specify an extension, such as PDF files. Let’s say you only want Tesla announcements that have been published as PDFs:

Other file extensions to try are “doc” (Word), “xls” (Excel), “ppt” (PowerPoint), and “txt” (text files). You can also use “filetype:” to specify certain varieties of web pages, including “html”, “php”, “asp”, etc. Keep in mind that the file extension typically has to be listed in the URL, so these searches are not exhaustive.

47. Find sites linking to competitors

link:nytimes.com tesla

The “link:” operator lets you do competitive link research. For example, the search above looks for all documents relevant to Tesla that have links from The New York Times:

Ok, so mostly this tells you that The New York Times links a lot to The New York Times. That’s probably not quite what you were looking for…

48. Find links excluding the source

link:nytimes.com -site:nytimes.com tesla

Let’s combine “link:” with a negative (-) “site:” operator to remove links from The New York Times:

Please note that Google has deprecated a lot of the functionality of the “link:” operator and the results it returns are just a sample (and, potentially, an unreliable sample). For in-depth competitive link research, we strongly recommend third-party tools, including our own Open Site Explorer.

49. Search inside link anchor text

inanchor:”tesla announcements”

You can use the “inanchor:” operator to search inside linked text. So, for example, the search above looks for sites being linked to from sites using “tesla announcements” in the linked text. In other words, the results represent the targets of those links (not the sources):

Please note that, like the “link:” operator, the “inanchor:” operator represents only a small sample of the index and is no longer actively supported by Google. Use it with a grain of salt.

50. Search multiple words in anchor text

allinanchor: tesla announcements “model x”

Like the other “allin…” varieties, “allinanchor:” applies to every word after it, looking for all of those words in the anchor text, but not as an exact-match:

The three link-based operators (“link:”, “inanchor:”, “allinanchor:”) can be useful for your initial research, but do not expect them to return a full, accurate representation of all links to your site or your competitors.

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V. Technical SEO/Audits

Advanced Google search operators can also be powerful tools for understanding how sites are indexed and for performing technical audits. Technical SEO is a complex subject, of course, but here are a few examples to get you started:

51. Glimpse into a site’s index

site:amazon.com

It all starts with the “site:” operator, which, at its most basic level, can help you get a glimpse of how Google indexes a site. Here are a few results from Google’s index of Amazon.com:

Please note that the result count here (and for any large-volume search) is at best an estimate. Given an estimate of 119,000,000 pages, though, we can be assured that the real number is massive. On the scale of any decent-sized site, you’re going to want to drill down…

52. Filter out the “www” subdomain

site:amazon.com -inurl:www

To drill deep into a site’s index, the combination of “site:” with “inurl:” will quickly become your best friend. For example, maybe you want to see only pages on Amazon that aren’t under the “www” subdomain. You could use “site:” along with a negative match (-) on the “inurl:” operator:

Even in the first few results, you can see a sampling of the other subdomains that Google is indexing. This can give you a good starting point for where to drill down next.

53. Filter out multiple subdomains

site:amazon.com -inurl:www -inurl:logistics -inurl:developer -inurl:kdp

You can extend this concept pretty far, building successively on earlier searches to return narrower and narrower lists of pages. Here’s an example with four “-inurl:” operators:

I’ve done this with over a dozen “inurl:” statements and am not aware of any fixed limit on how many operators you can combine in a single search. Most sites aren’t big enough to require those kinds of extremes, but it’s good to know that it’s possible if and when you need it.

54. Focus on a single subdomain

site:developer.amazon.com

Alternatively, you can focus on a single subdomain. For this, I generally prefer to include the subdomain in the “site:” operator instead of using “inurl:”. Otherwise, you could find the text anywhere in the URL:

You could extend this concept to dive deeper into any of the sub-folders returned here (“/ios”, “/ja”, etc.) and even combine a more specific “site:” operator with additional “inurl:” operators.

55. Filter for non-secure pages

site:amazon.com -inurl:https

Interestingly, you can use “inurl:” to include or exclude secure (https:) pages:

If you’re moving a site from “http:” to “https:”, this trick can help you make sure that new pages are being indexed properly and old pages are gradually disappearing from the index.

56. Search for a URL parameter

site:amazon.com inurl:field-keywords

You can also use “inurl:” to target URL parameters on dynamic pages. For example, let’s say you want to see what kind of internal search pages Google is indexing on Amazon:

Please note that there’s no way to specify a URL parameter – Google may find the text anywhere in the URL. On the bright side, many URL parameters tend to have unique names.

57. Search multiple URL attributes

allinurl: amazon field-keywords nikon

Much like “allintitle:” and “allintext:”, there’s an “allinurl:” operator. In this example, you’re looking for internal search pages on Amazon that have the word “Nikon” in the URL:

Unfortunately, “allinurl:” suffers from two problems. One, you can’t reliably combine it with “site:”, which limits your options. Two, it tends to return strange results. For example, notice that the top results for my US search were from Amazon France. In most cases, I recommend using multiple “inurl:” statements instead.

58. Find stray text files

site:amazon.com filetype:txt -inurl:robots.txt

You might be wondering if you left any stray documentation files laying around your site that happened to get picked up by Google. You can do this using a combination of “site:” and “filetype:”:

In this case, you want to exclude “robots.txt” (using “-inurl:”) because Amazon has dozens of Robots files. This combo is a good way to clean up files that have been accidentally left live on a site.

59. Dig deep into duplicate content

site:amazon.com “hot wheels 20 car gift pack”

A site like Amazon has massive potential for internal duplicate content. By using the “site:” operator with exact match phrases, you can start to pin down near-duplicates:

In this case, Google is still returning almost 1,000 results. Time to dig deeper…

60. Dig through duplicate titles

site:amazon.com intitle:”hot wheels 20 car gift pack”

You can specifically using “site:” plus “intitle:” to find pages on a site that may be exact duplicates.

Believe it or not, Google still returns over 100 matching pages. Let’s keep at it…

61. Find title duplicates with exclusions

site:amazon.com intitle:”hot wheels 20 car gift pack” -inurl:review -inurl:reviews

You dig in and notice that many of the results in #60 are review pages, with either “review” or “reviews” in the URL. So, you build on the previous search and add two exclusions:

Voilà… you’re down to just a half-dozen results. You just leveled up in technical SEO.

62. Find similar products with different counts

site:amazon.com “hot wheels * car gift pack”

Maybe you’re curious about other Hot Wheels gifts packs that represent similar products but not exactly the same one. You could replace “20” with the wildcard (*) operator:

Unfortunately, wildcards don’t play well with the “intitle:” operator, so you’ll generally be restricted to exact-match phrases outside of advanced operators.

63. Find similar products with exclusions

site:amazon.com “hot wheels * car gift pack” -20

Given all of the previous searches, you probably don’t need to know about the 20-packs, so you can add an exclusion on the number 20 (just treat it as a word with negative match):

Looks like there’s a healthy number of 5-car gift packs as well. The plot thickens…

64. Follow the rabbit hole to Wonderland

site:amazon.com “hot wheels * car gift pack” -20 -5

It’s time to take the red pill and find out just how deep this rabbit hole goes. You can keep adding exclusions and take out the 5-packs as well:

Finally, you’re nearing the bottom. This process may seem a bit obsessive, but auditing large sites is a process of identifying potential problems and drilling down until you either you pin down the issues or decide they aren’t worth worrying about. Once you master them, advanced search operators shine at drill-downs.

65. Bonus: Show me the money!

site:amazon.com “hot wheels” $19.95

I woke up in a cold sweat at 2am realizing I had forgotten a search operator (sadly, while you may find it funny, this is not a joke). I warned earlier that special characters can produce weird results, but one that Google does recognize is the dollar sign ($):

This isn’t really a site audit example, but it fits well with our Amazon story. Keep in mind that, while Google will honor the ($) in the results, they could appear anywhere in those results. Many Amazon pages list multiple prices. Still, it can be a useful tool to add to your arsenal.

66. Find results in a price range

site:amazon.com “hot wheels” $19..$20

You can also combine a ($) search with the range operator (..) and search a range of prices. Let’s say you wanted to find any pages mentioning “Hot Wheels” and prices in the $19-20 range:

While this tactic can definitely be useful for general product research, e-commerce sites can also use it in an audit to find pages with incorrect or outdated prices.

67. Find other TLDs for your brand

site:amazon.* -site:amazon.com

This last tip could be either an audit trick or a way to track down the competition, depending on how you use it. Use the wildcard (*) in the top-level domain (TLD) to find any site with the same name, and then exclude the main site:

For a large site, like Amazon, this could help you find other legitimate TLDs, including country-specific TLDs (ccTLDs). Alternatively, you could use this trick to find competitors who have registered your brand name under other TLDs.

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Wait, You’re Still Here?

Congratulations for making it this far. I hope you’ve picked up at least a handful of useful tricks and the confidence to experiment. If you have favorites I’m missing, please feel free to share them in the comments. I’m sure there’s a good trick or ten I’ve never seen.

If you need a quick reference, we’ve launched a new Search Operators reference and cheat sheet in the Learning Center. This resource reflects the current state of Google’s search operators, as best we know, including deprecated operators.

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Posted by kerryjones

Do your link building results look something like this?

1. Start doing outreach
2. Get links
3. Stop doing outreach
4. No more links

Everyone talks about the long-term benefits of using content marketing as part of a link building strategy. But without the right type of content, your experience may be that you stop earning links as soon as you stop doing outreach.

In this sense, you have to keep putting gas in the car for it to keep running (marketing “gas” = time, effort, and resources). But what if there was a way to fill up the car once, and that would give it enough momentum to run for months or even years?

An example of this is a salary negotiations survey we published last year on Harvard Business Review. The study was picked up by TechCrunch months after we had finished actively promoting it. We didn’t reach out to TechCrunch. Rather, this writer presumably stumbled upon our content while doing research for his article.

So what’s the key to long-term links? Content that acts as a source.

The goal is to create something that people will find and link to when they’re in need of sources to cite in content they are creating. Writers constantly seek out sources that will back up their claims, strengthen an argument, or provide further context for readers. If your content can serve as a citation, you can be in a good position to earn a lot of passive links.

Read on for information about which content types are most likely to satisfy people in need of sources and tips on how to execute these content types yourself.

Original research and new data

Content featuring new research can be extremely powerful for building authoritative links via a PR outreach strategy.

A lot of the content we create for our clients falls under this category, but not every single link that our client campaigns earn are directly a result of us doing outreach.

In many cases, a large number of links to our client research campaigns earn come from what we call syndication. This is what typically plays out when we get a client’s campaign featured on a popular, authoritative site (which is Site A in the following scenario):

• Send content pitch to Site A.
• Site A publishes article linking to content.
• Site B sees content featured on Site A. Site B publishes article linking to content.
• Site C sees content featured on Site A. Site C publishes article linking to content.
• And so on…

So, what does this have to do with long-term link earning? Once the content is strategically seeded on relevant sites using outreach and syndication, it is well-positioned to be found by other publishers.

Site A’s content functions as the perfect citation for these additional publishers because it’s the original source of the newsworthy information, establishing it as the authority and thus making it more likely to be linked to. (This is what happened in the TechCrunch example I shared above.)

Examples

In a recent Experts on the Wire podcast, guest Andy Crestodina talked about the “missing stat.” According to Andy, most industries have “commonly asserted, but rarely supported” statements. These “stats” are begging for someone to conduct research that will confirm or debunk them. (Side note: this particular podcast episode inspired this post – definitely worth a listen!)

To find examples of content that uncovers a missing stat in the wild, we can look right here on the Moz blog…

Confirming industry assumptions

When we did our native advertising versus content marketing study, we went into it with a hypothesis that many fellow marketers would agree with: Content marketing campaigns perform better than native advertising campaigns.

This was a missing stat; there hadn’t been any studies done proving or debunking this assumption. Furthermore, there wasn’t any publicly available data about the average number of links acquired for content marketing campaigns. This was a concrete data point a lot of marketers (including us!) wanted to know since it would serve as a performance benchmark.

As part of the study, we surveyed 30 content marketing agencies about how many links the average content marketing campaign earned, in addition to other questions related to pricing, client KPIs, and more.

After the research was published here on Moz, we did some promotion to get our data featured on Harvard Business Review, Inc, and Marketing Land. This data is still being linked to and shared today without us actively promoting it, such as this mention on SEMRush’s blog and this mention on the Scoop It blog (pictured below).

To date, it’s been featured on more than 80 root domains and earned dozens of co-citations. It’s worth noting that this has been about far more than acquiring high-quality links; this research has been extremely effective for driving new business to our agency, which it continues to do to this day.

Debunking industry assumptions

But research doesn’t always confirm presumptions. For example, Buzzsumo and Moz’s research collaboration examined a million online articles. A key finding of their research: There was no overall correlation between sharing and linking. This debunked a commonly held assumption among marketers that content that gets a lot of shares will earn a lot of links, and vice versa. To date, this post has received an impressive 403 links from 190 root domains (RDs) according to Open Site Explorer.

How to use this strategy

To find original research ideas, look at how many backlinks the top results have gotten for terms like:

• [Industry topic] report
• [Industry topic] study
• [Industry topic] research

Then, using the MozBar, evaluate what you see in the top SERPs:

• Have the top results gotten a sizable number of backlinks? (This tells you if this type of research has potential to attract links.)
• Is the top-ranking content outdated? Can you provide new information? (Try Rand’s tips on leveraging keywords + year.)
• Is there a subtopic you could explore?

Additionally, seeing what has already succeeded will allow you to determine two very important things: what can be updated and what can be improved upon. This is a great place to launch a brainstorm session for new data acquisition ideas.

Industry trend and benchmark reports

Sure, this content type overlaps with “New Research and Studies,” but it merits its own section because of its specificity and high potential.

If your vertical experiences significant change from one year, quarter, or month to the next, there may be an opportunity to create recurring reports that analyze the state of your industry. This is a great opportunity to engage all different kinds of brands within your industry while also showcasing your authority in the subject.

How?

People often like to take trends and add their own commentary as to why trends are occurring or how to make the most of a new, popular strategy. That means they’ll often link to your report to provide the context.

And there’s an added promotional benefit: Once you begin regularly publishing and promoting this type of content, your industry will anticipate future releases.

Examples

HubSpot’s State of Inbound report, which features survey data from thousands of HubSpot customers, has been published annually for the last eight years. To date, the URL that hosts the report has links from 495 RDs.

Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs have teamed up for the last seven years to release two annual content marketing benchmark reports. The most recent report on B2B content marketing has earned links from 130 RDs. To gather the data, CMI and MarketingProfs emailed a survey to a sample of marketers from their own email marketing lists as well as a few lists from partner companies.

In addition to static reports, you can take this a step further and create something dynamic that is continually updated, like Indeed’s Job Trends Search (171 RDs) which pulls from their internal job listing data.

How to use this strategy

Where can you find fresh industry data? Here are a few suggestions:

Survey your customers/clients

You have a whole pool of people who have been involved in your industry, so why not ask them some questions to learn more about their thoughts, needs, fears, and experiences?

Talking directly to customers and clients is a great way to cut through speculation and discover exactly what problems they’re facing and the solutions they’re seeking.

Survey your industry

There are most likely companies in your industry that aren’t direct competitors but have a wealth of insight to provide to the overall niche.

For example, we at Fractl surveyed 1,300 publishers because we wanted to learn more about what they were looking for in content pitches. This knowledge is valuable to any content marketers involved in content promotions (including ourselves!).

Ask yourself: What aspect of your industry might need some more clarification, and who can you reach out to for more information?

Use your internal company data

This is often the easiest and most effective option. You probably have a ton of interesting data based on your interactions with customers and clients that would benefit fellow professionals in your industry.

Think about these internal data sets you have and consider how you can break it down to reveal trends in your niche while also providing actionable insights to readers.

Curated resources

Research can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of creating content. If someone has pulled together a substantial amount of information on the topic in one place, it can save anyone else writing about it a lot of time.

If you’re willing to put in the work of digging up data and examples, curated resource content may be your key to evergreen link building. Let’s look at a few common applications of this style of content.

Examples

Collections of statistics and facts

Don’t have the means to conduct your own research? Combining insightful data points from credible sources into one massive resource is also effective for long-term link attraction, especially if you keep updating your list with fresh data.

HubSpot’s marketing statistics list has attracted links from 963 root domains. For someone looking for data points to cite, a list like this can be a gold mine. This comprehensive data collection features their original data plus data from external sources. It’s regularly updated with new data, and there’s even a call-to-action at the end of the list to submit new stats.

Your list doesn’t need to be as broad as the HubSpot example, which covers a wide range of marketing topics. A curated list around a more granular topic can work, too, such as this page filled with mobile email statistics (550 RDs).

Concrete examples

Good writers help readers visualize what they’re writing about. To do this, you need to show concrete evidence of abstract ideas. As my 7th grade English teacher used to tell us: show, don’t tell.

By grouping a bunch of relevant examples in a single resource, you can save someone a lot of time when they’re in need of examples to illustrate the points they make in their writing. I can write thousands of words about the idea of 10x content, but without showing examples of what it looks like in action, you’re probably going to have a hard time understanding it. Similarly, the bulk of time it took me to create this post was spent finding concrete examples of the types of content I refer to.

The resource below showcases 50 examples of responsive design. Simple in its execution, the content features screenshots of each responsive website and a descriptive paragraph or two. It’s earned links from 184 RDs.

Authority Nutrition’s list of 20 high-protein foods has links from 53 RDs. If I’m writing a nutrition article where I mention high-protein foods, linking to this page will save me from researching and listing out a handful of protein-rich foods.

How to use this strategy

The first step is to determine what kind of information would be valuable to have all in one place for other professionals in your industry to access.

Often times, it’s the same information that would be valuable for you.

Here are some ways to brainstorm:

• Explore your recent blog posts or other on-site content. What needed a lot of explaining? What topics did you wish you had more examples to link to? Take careful note of your own content needs while tackling your own work.
• Examine comments on other industry articles and resources. What are people asking for? This is a gold mine for the needs of potential customers. You can take a similar approach on Reddit and Quora.
• What works for other industries that you can apply to your own? Search for terms like the following to see what has been successful for other niches that you can apply to yours:
  • [Industry topic] examples
  • types of [industry topic]
  • list of [Industry topic]
  • [Industry topic] statistics OR stats
  • [Industry topic] facts

No matter which way you choose to proceed, the time investment can help you garner many links down the line.

Beginner content

Every niche has a learning curve, with various words, concepts, and ideas being foreign to a beginner.

Content that teaches noobs the ins and outs of your vertical has long-term linking potential. This type of content is popular for citations because it saves the writer from explaining things in their own words. Instead, they can link to the expert’s explanation.

And the best part is you can tap your internal experts to provide great insights that can serve as the foundation for this type of content.

Examples

101 Content

Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO is a master class in how comprehensive beginner-level content becomes a link magnet. Not only does the guide have backlinks from more than 1,700 RDs, it also edges out the home page as the most-trafficked page on the site, according to SEMrush.

“What is…?”

Beginner content need not be as massive and thorough as the Moz guide to be linkable. It can be as simple as defining an industry term or concept.

Moz’s meta description page, which has backlinks from 244 RDs, is a solid example of an authoritative yet simple answer to a “what is?” query.

Another example is the first result in Google for the query “what is the Paleo diet,” which has 731 links from 228 RDs. It’s not a 10,000-word academic paper about the paleo diet. Rather, it’s a concise answer to the question. This page has served as an excellent source for anyone writing about the Paleo diet within the last several years.

If a lot of adequate top-level, definition-style content already exists about topics related to your vertical, consider creating content around emerging terms and concepts that aren’t yet widely understood, but may soon be more mainstream.

The perfect example of this? Creating a definitive explanation about content marketing before the entire world knew what content marketing meant. Case in point: Content Marketing Institute’s “What is Content Marketing?” page has amassed an impressive from 12,462 links from 1,100 root domains.

How to use this strategy

Buzzsumo recently released a new tool called Bloomberry which scours forums including Reddit and Quora for questions being asked about a keyword. You can search by time period (ex. questions asked within the last 6 months, all-time results, etc.) and filter by source (ex. only see questions asked in Reddit).

Use Bloomberry to see what beginner questions are being asked about your keyword/topic. Keyword ideas include:

• [Industry topic] definition
• How does [industry topic] work
• [Industry topic] guide
• What is [industry topic]

After doing the search, ask yourself:

• What questions keep coming up?
• How are these common questions being answered?

Bloomberry is also useful for spotting research opportunities. Within the first few results for “SaaS” I found three potential research ideas.

Pro tip: Return to these threads and provide an answer plus link to your content once it’s published.

Yes, you still need to promote your content

Don’t mistake this post as a call to stop actively doing outreach and promotion to earn links. Content promotion should serve as the push that gives your content the momentum to continue earning links. After you put in the hard work of getting your content featured on reputable sites with sizable audiences, you have strong potential to organically attract more links. And the more links your content has, the easier it will be for writers and publishers in need of sources to find it.

What types of content do you think are best for earning citation links? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you – please share your experiences in the comments below.

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Posted by randfish

Trying to target a small, specific region with your keywords can prove frustrating. While reaching a high-intent local audience is incredibly valuable, without volume data to inform your keyword research, you’ll find yourself hitting a wall. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares how to uncover powerful, laser-focused keywords that will reach exactly the right people.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about hyperlocal keyword research. Now, this is a big challenge, not only for hyperlocal-focused businesses, but also for all kinds of websites that are trying to target very small regions, and many of them, with their keyword research and keyword targeting, on-page optimization.

The problem:

So the problem tends to be that most keyword research tools, and this includes things like the Google AdWords Tool, it includes Moz’s Keyword Explorer, or KeywordTool.io, or Übersuggest, or anybody you want to use, most of them are relying on volume data.

So what happens is when you see a bunch of keyword suggestions, you type in “Sequim,” for example, Sequim is a tiny town on Washington’s peninsula, so across the Puget Sound from where we are here in Seattle. Sequim has a population of like 6,500 people or something like that, so very tiny. So most searches related to Sequim have no volume data in any of these tools. As a result, you don’t see a lot of information about: How can I target these keywords? What are the right ones to go after? You don’t know whether a keyword has zero searches a month, or whether it has four searches a month, and those four searchers are exactly who you want to get in front of, and this is really problematic.

There are three solutions that we’ve seen professional SEOs use and that some of us here at Moz use and the Moz Local team uses, and these can be real handy for you.

Solution 1: Use keyword data for larger, similar regions

So the first one is to basically replicate the data by using keyword information that comes from similar regions nearby. So let’s say, okay, here we are in Sequim, Washington, population 6,669. But Port Angeles is only a few miles away. I think maybe a couple dozen miles away. But its population is more like 20,000. So we’ve got four or five times the keyword volume for most searches probably. This is going to include some outlying areas. So now we can start to get data. Not everything is going to be zero searches per month, and we can probably backtrack that to figure out what Sequim’s data is going to be like.

The same thing goes for Ruidoso versus Santa Fe. Ruidoso, almost 8,000. But Santa Fe’s population is almost 10 times larger at 70,000. Or Stowe, Vermont, 4,300, tiny, little town. Burlington is nearby, 10 times bigger at 42,000. Great. So now I can take these numbers and I can intuit what the relative volumes are, because the people of Burlington are probably similar in their search patterns to the people of Stowe. There are going to be a few differences, but for most types of local searches this will work.

Solution 2: Let Google autosuggest help

The second one, Google autosuggest can be really helpful here. So Google Suggest does not care if there’s one search a month or one search in the last year, versus zero searched in the last year. They’ll still show you something. Well, zero searched in the last year, they won’t show you anything.

But for example, when I search for “Sequim day,” I can intuit here, because of the ordering that Google Suggest shows me, that “Sequim day spa” is more popular than “day care.” Sequim, by the way, sounds like a lovely place to live if you are someone who enjoys few children and lots of spa time, apparently. Then, “day hikes.”

So this technique doesn’t just work with Google itself. It’ll also work with Bing, with Google Maps, and with YouTube. Another suggestion on this one, you will see different results if you use a mobile device versus a desktop device. So you might want to change it up and try your mobile device. That can give you some different results.

Solution 3: Use lexical or related SERP suggestions

All right. Third tactic here, last one, you can use sort of two styles of keyword research. One is called lexical, which is basically the semantic relationships between words and phrases. The other one is related SERP suggestions, which is where a keyword research tool — Moz Keyword Explorer does this, SEMrush is very popular for this, and there are a few others — and they will basically show you search terms the links that came up, the search results that came up for “Sequim day care” also came up in searches for these terms and phrases. So these are like SERPs for which your SERP also ranked.

You can see, when I searched for “Sequim day care,” I did this in Keyword Explorer, because I happen to have a Moz Keyword Explorer subscription. It’s very nice of Moz to give me that. You can see that I used two kinds of suggestions. One are related to keywords with similar results, so that’s the related SERPs. The other one was based on closely related topics, like the semantic, lexical thing. “Sequim day care” has given me great stuff like “Banbury School Nursery,” a nearby town, “secondary schools in Banbury,” “Horton Day Nursery,” which is a nursery that’s actually near there, “Port Angeles childcare,” “children’s nursery.”

So now I’m getting a bunch of keyword suggestions that can potentially be relevant and lead me down a path. When I look at closely related topics, I can see things like closely related topics. By the way, what I did is I actually removed the term “Sequim,” because that was showing me a lot of things that are particular to that region. But if I search for “day care,” I can see lots of closely related topics, like day care center, childcare, school care, special needs children, preschool programs, and afterschool programs. So now I can take all of these and apply the name of the town and get these hyperlocal results.

This is frustrating still. You don’t have nearly the data that you have for much more popular search terms. But this is a good way to start building that keyword list, targeting, experimenting, and testing out the on-page work that you’re going to need to do to rank for these terms. Then, you’ll start to see your traffic grow from these.

Hyperlocal may be small, but it can be powerful, it can be very targeted, and it can bring you exactly the customers you’re looking for.

So good luck with your targeting out there, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Casey_Meraz

In 2016, I predicted that ranking in the 3-pack was hard and it would continually get more competitive. I maintain that prediction for 2017, but I want to make one thing clear. If you haven’t done so, I believe local businesses should start to look outside of a local-SEO-3-Pack-ONLY focused strategy.

While local SEO still presents a tremendous opportunity to grow your business, I’m going to look at some supplementary organic strategies you can take into your local marketing campaign, as well.

In this post I’m going to address:

• How local search has changed since last year
• Why & how your overall focus may need to change in 2017
• Actionable advice on how to rank better to get more local traffic & more business

In local search success, one thing is clear

The days of getting in the 3-pack and having a one-trick pony strategy are over. Every business wants to get the free traffic from Google’s local results, but the chances are getting harder everyday. Not only are you fighting against all of your competitors trying to get the same rankings, but now you’re also fighting against even more ads.

If you thought it was hard to get top placement today in the local pack, just consider that you’re also fighting against 4+ ads before customers even have the possibility of seeing your business.

Today’s SERPs are ad-rich with 4 paid ads at the top, and now it’s not uncommon to find paid listings prioritized in local results. Just take a look at this example that Gyi Tsakalakis shared with me, showing one ad in the local pack on mobile ranking above the 3-pack results. Keep in mind, there are four other ads above this.

If you were on desktop and you clicked on one of the 3-pack results, you’re taken to the local finder. In the desktop search example below, once you make it to the local finder you’ll see two paid local results above the other businesses.

Notice how only the companies participating in paid ads have stars. Do you think that gives them an advantage? I do.

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Don’t worry though, I’m not jaded by ads

After all of that gloomy ad SERP talk, you’re probably getting a little depressed. Don’t. With every change there comes new opportunity, and we’ve seen many of our clients excel in search by focusing on multiple strategies that work for their business.

Focusing on the local pack should still be a strong priority for you, even if you don’t have a pay-to-play budget for ads. Getting listed in the local finder can still result in easy wins — especially if you have the most reviews, as Google has very handy sorting options.

If you have the highest rating score, you can easily get clicks when users decide to sort the results they see by the business rating. Below is an example of how users can easily sort by ratings.

But what else can you do to compete effectively in your local market?

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Consider altering your local strategy

Most businesses I speak with seem to have tunnel vision. They think it’s more important to rank in the local pack and, in some cases, even prioritize this over the real goal: more customers.

Every day, I talk to new businesses and marketers that seem to have a single area of focus. While it’s not necessarily a bad thing to do one thing really well, the ones that are most successful are managing a variety of campaigns tied to their business goals.

Instead of taking a single approach of focusing on just free local clicks, expand your horizon a bit and ask yourself this question: Where are my customers looking and how can I get in front of them?

Sometimes taking a step back and looking at things from the 30,000-ft view is beneficial.

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You can start by asking yourself these questions by examining the SERPs:

1. What websites, OTHER THAN MY OWN, have the most visibility for the topics and keywords I’m interested in?

You can bet people are clicking on results other than your own website underneath the local results. Are they websites you can show up on? How do you increase that visibility?

I think STAT has a great tracking tool for this. You simply set up the keywords you want to track and their Share of Voice feature shows who’s ranking where and what percentage of visibility they have in your specific market.

In the example below, you can see the current leaders in a space I’m tracking. Notice how Findlaw & Yelp show up there. With a little further research I can find out if they have number 1–2 rankings (which they do) and determine whether I should put in place a strategy to rank there. This is called barnacle SEO.

2. Are my customers using voice search?

Maybe it’s just me, but I find it strange to talk to my computer. That being said, I have no reservations about talking to my phone — even when I’m in places I shouldn’t. Stone Temple recently published a great study on voice command search, which you can check out here.

Some of the cool takeaways from that study were where people search from. It seems people are more likely to search from the privacy of their own home, but most mobile devices out there today have voice search integrated. I wonder how many people are doing this from their cars?
This goes to show that local queries are not just about the 3-pack. While many people may ask their device “What’s the nearest pizza place,” other’s may ask a variety of questions like:

Where is the highest-rated pizza place nearby?
Who makes the best pizza in Denver?
What’s the closest pizza place near me?

Don’t ignore voice search when thinking about your localized organic strategy. Voice is mobile and voice can sure be local. What localized searches would someone be interested in when looking for my business? What questions might they be asking that would drive them to my local business?

3. Is my website optimized for “near me” searches?

“Near me” searches have been on the rise over the past five years and I don’t expect that to stop. Sometimes customers are just looking for something close by. Google Trends data shows how this has changed in the past five years:
Are you optimizing for a “near me” strategy for your business? Recently the guys over at Local SEO Guide did a study of “near me” local SEO ranking factors. Optimizing for “near me” searches is important and it falls right in line with some of the tactical advice we have for increasing your Google My Business rankings as well. More on that later.

4. Should my business stay away from ads?

Let’s start by looking at a some facts. Google makes money off of their paid ads. According to an article from Adweek, “During the second quarter of 2016, Alphabet’s revenue hit $21.5 billion, a 21% year-over-year increase. Of that revenue, $19.1 billion came from Google’s advertising business, up from $16 billion a year ago.”

This roughly translates to: “Ads aren’t going anywhere and Google is going to do whatever they can to put them in your face.” If you didn’t see the Home Service ad test with all ads that Mike Blumenthal pointed out, you can check it out below. Google is trying to find more creative ways to monetize local search.
Incase you haven’t heard it before, having both organic and paid listings ranking highly increases your overall click-through rate.

Although the last study I found was from Google in 2012, we’ve found that our clients have the most success when they rank strong organically, locally, and have paid placements. All of these things tie together. If potential customers are already searching for your business, you’ll see great results by being involved in all of these areas.

While I’m not a fan of only taking a pay-to-play approach, you need to at least start considering it and testing it for your niche to see if it works for you. Combine it with your overall local and organic strategy.

5. Are we ignoring the featured snippets?

Searches with local intent can still trigger featured snippets. One example that I saw recently and really liked was the snowboard size chart example, which you can see below. In this example, someone who is interested in snowboards gets an answer box that showcases a company. If someone is doing this type of research, there’s a likelihood that they may wish to purchase a snowboard soon.
Depending on your niche, there are plenty of opportunities to increase your local visibility by not ignoring featured snippets and creating content to rank there. Check out this Whiteboard Friday to learn more about how you can get featured snippets.

Now that we’ve looked at some ways you can expand your strategies, let’s look at some tactical steps you can take to move the needle.

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Here’s how you can gain more visibility

Now that you have an open mind, let’s take a look at the actionable things you can do to improve your overall visibility and rankings in locally centric campaigns. As much as I like to think local SEO is rocket science, it really isn’t. You really need to focus your attention on the things that are going to move the needle.

I’m also going to assume you’ve already done the basics, like optimize your listing by filling out the profile 100%.

Later last year, Local SEO Guide and Placescout did a great study that looked at 100+ variables from 30,000 businesses to determine what factors might have the most overall impact in local 3-pack rankings. If you have some spare time I recommend checking it out. It verified that the signals we put the most effort into seem to have the greatest overall effect.

I’m only going to dive into a few of those factors, but here are the things I would do to focus on a results-first strategy:

Start with a solid website/foundation

What good are rankings without conversions? The answer is they aren’t any good. If you’re always keeping your business goals in mind, start with the basics. If your website isn’t loading fast, you’re losing conversions and you may experience a reduced crawl budget.

My #1 recommendation that affects all aspects of SEO and conversions is to start with a solid website. Ignoring this usually creates bigger problems later down the road and can negatively impact your overall rankings.

Your website should be SEO-friendly and load in the 90th percentile on Google’s Page Speed Insights. You can also see how fast your website loads for users using tools like GTMetrix. Google seems to reduce the visibility of slower websites, so if you’re ignoring the foundation you’re going to have issues. Here are 6 tips you can use for a faster Wordpress website.

Crawl errors for bots can also wreak havoc on your website. You should always strive to maintain a healthy site. Check up on your website using Google’s Search Console and use Moz Pro to monitor your clients’ campaigns by actively tracking the sites’ health, crawl issues, and domain health over time. Having higher scores and less errors should be your focus.

Continue with a strong review generation strategy

I’m sure many of you took a deep breath when earlier this month Google changed the review threshold to only 1 review. That’s right. In case you didn’t hear, Google is now giving all businesses a review score based on any number of reviews you have, as you can see in the example below:
I know a lot of my colleagues were a big fan of this, but I have mixed feelings since Google isn’t taking any serious measures to reduce review spam or penalize manipulative businesses at this point.

Don’t ignore the other benefits of reviews, as well. Earlier I mentioned that users can sort by review stars; having more reviews will increase your overall CTR. Plus, after talking to many local businesses, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback that consumers are actively using these scores more than ever.

So, how do you get more reviews?

Luckily, Google’s current Review and Photo Policies do not prohibit the direct solicitation of reviews at this point (unlike Yelp).

Start by soliciting past customers on your list
If you’re not already collecting customer information on your website or in-store, you’re behind the times and you need to start doing so immediately.

I work mainly with attorneys. Working in that space, there are regulations we have to follow, and typically the number of clients is substantially less than a pizza joint. In pickles like this, where the volume is low, we can take a manual approach where we identify the happiest clients and reach out to them using this process. This particular process also creates happy employees. 🙂

1. List creation: We start by screening the happiest clients. We then sort these by who has a Gmail account for priority’s sake.
2. Outreach by phone: I don’t know why digital marketers are afraid of the phone, but we’ve had a lot of success calling our prior clients. We have the main point-of-contact from the business who’s worked with them before call and ask how the service they received was. The caller informs them that they have a favor to ask and that their overall job performance is partially based off of client feedback. They indicate they’re going to send a follow-up email if it’s OK with the customer.
3. Send a follow-up email: We then use a Google review link generator, which creates an exact URL that opens the review box for the person if they’re logged into their Gmail account.
4. Follow-up email: Sometimes emails get lost. We follow up a few times to make sure the client leaves the review…
5. You have a new review!

The method above works great for low-volume businesses. If you’re a higher-volume business or have a lot of contacts, I recommend using a more automated service to prepare for future and ongoing reviews, as it’ll make the process a heck of a lot easier. Typically we use Get Five Stars or Infusionsoft integrations to complete this for our clients.

If you run a good business that people like, you can see results like this. This is a local business which had 7 reviews in 2015. Look where they are now with a little automation asking happy customers to leave a review:

Don’t ignore & don’t be afraid of links

One thing Google succeeded at is scaring away people from getting manipulative links. In many areas, that went too far and resulted in people not going after links at all, diminishing their value as a ranking factor, and telling the world that links are dead.

Well, I’m here to tell you that you need good links to your website. If you want to rank in competitive niches or in certain geographic areas, the anchor text can make a big difference. Multiple studies have shown the effectiveness of links to this very day, and their importance cannot be overlooked.

This table outlines which link tactics work best for each strategy:

Strategy Type	Link Tactic
Local SEO (3-Pack)	Links to local GMB-connected landing page will help 3-pack rankings. City, state, and keyword-included anchor text is beneficial
Featured Snippets	Links to pages where you want to get a featured snippet will help boost the authority of that page.
Paid Ads	Links will not help your paid ads.
“Near Me” Searches	Links with city, state, or area anchor text will help you in near me searches.
Voice Search	Links to pages that are FAQ or consist of long-tail keyword content will help them rank better organically.
Barnacle SEO	Links to websites you don’t own can help them rank better. Focus on high-authority profiles or business listings.

There are hundreds of ways to build links for your firm. You need to avoid paying for links and spammy tactics because they’re just going to hurt you. Focus on strong and sustainable strategies — if you want to do it right, there aren’t any shortcuts.

Since there are so many great link building resources out there, I’ve linked to a few of my favorite where you can get tactical advice and start building links below.

For specific tactical link building strategies, check out these resources:

• Link Building Tactics by Jon Cooper – This is the most comprehensive list I have found.
• Link Building: The Definitive Guide from Backlinko
• 21 Link Building Tips from Juris Digital
• The Ultimate List of Local Link Building Ideas from Nifty Marketing

If you participate in outreach or broken link building, check out this new post from Directive Consulting — “How We Increased Our Email Response Rate from ~8% to 34%” — to increase the effectiveness of your outreach.

Get relevant & high-authority citations

While the importance of citations has taken a dive in recent years as a major ranking factor, they still carry quite a bit of importance.

Do you remember the example from earlier in this post, where we saw Findlaw and Yelp having strong visibility in the market? These websites get traffic, and if a potential customer is looking for you somewhere where you’re not, that’s one touchpoint lost. You’ll still need to address quality over quantity. The days of looking for 1,000 citations are over and have been for many years. If you have 1,000 citations, you probably have a lot of spam links to your website. We don’t need those. But what we do need is highly relevant directories to either our city or niche.

This post I wrote over 4 years ago is still pretty relevant on how you can find these citations and build them with consistency. Remember that high-authority citations can also be unstructured (not a typical business directory). They can also be very high-quality links if the site is authoritative and has fewer business listings. There are millions of listings on Yelp, but maybe less than one hundred on some other powerful, very niche-specific websites.

Citation and link idea: What awards was your business eligible or nominated for?

One way to get these is to consider awards where you can get an authoritative citation and link to your website. Take a look at the example below of a legal website. This site is a peanut compared to a directory like Yelp. Sure, it doesn’t carry near as much authority, but the link equity is more evenly distributed.

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Lastly, stay on point

2017 is sure to be a volatile year for local search, but it’s important to stay on point. Spread your wings, open your mind, and diversify with strategies that are going to get your business more customers.

Now it’s time to tell me what you think! Is something I didn’t mention working better for you? Where are you focusing your efforts in local search?

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Posted by Whitespark

Have you noticed that a lot of local pack results don’t seem to make sense these days? Almost every time I search Google for a local search term, the pack results leave me wondering, “Why are these businesses ranking?”

For example, take a look at the results I get for “plumbers”:

(Searched in an incognito Chrome browser on PC in Edmonton)

Here’s a quick summary of the basic local ranking factors for the businesses in this local pack:

Notice that:

• None of the businesses have claimed/verified their Google listing.
• None of the businesses have any Google reviews.
• Only one of the businesses even has a website!

Surely, Google, there are more prominent businesses in Edmonton that deserve to rank for this term?

Here’s the data table again with one additional point added: proximity to the searcher.

These business are all so close to me that I could walk to them in about 8 to 15 minutes. Here’s a map of Edmonton with pins for my location and these 3 businesses. Just look at how close they are to my location:

After analyzing dozens of queries that my colleagues and I searched for, I am going to make a bold statement:

“Proximity to searcher is the new #1 ranking factor in local search results today.” – Darren Shaw

For most local searches these days, proximity appears to be weighted more than links, website content, citations, and reviews in the local pack rankings. Google doesn’t seem to value the traditional local search ranking factors when determining which businesses to rank in the local pack. The main consideration seems to be: “Which businesses are closest to the searcher?” I have been noticing this trend for at least the last 8 months or so, and it seems to have intensified since the Possum update.

Evidence of proximity-based local rankings

Whitespark has team members that are scattered throughout Edmonton, so four of us ran a series of searches from our home offices to see how the results differ across the city.

Here is a map showing where we are physically located in Edmonton:

On desktop, Google doesn’t actually know exactly where we are. It guesstimates it based on IP, WiFi, and mobile data. You can figure out where Google thinks you’re located by doing the following:

1. Open an incognito browser in Chrome.
2. Go to maps.google.com.
3. Search for a local business in your city.
4. Click the “Directions” button.
5. Enter “my location” into the top field.

In order to give you directions, Maps will drop a circle on the spot that it thinks you’re located at.

Here’s where Google thinks I am located:

As a team, at approximately the same time of day, all four of us searched the same 9 local queries in incognito browser windows and saved screenshots of our results.

The search terms:

Non-geo-modified terms (keyword):
plumbers
lawyers
coffee shops

Geo-modified terms (keyword + city):
plumbers edmonton
edmonton plumbers
edmonton lawyers
lawyers edmonton
coffee shops edmonton
edmonton coffee shops

Below are the mapped results for 9 local queries that we each searched in incognito browsers. Rather than dumping 24 maps on the page, here they are in a Slideshare that you can click through:

Proximity is the New Top Local Search Ranking Factor from Darren Shaw

As you click through, you’ll see that each of us get completely different results, and that these results are generally clustered around our location.

You can also see that proximity impacted non-geo-modified terms (“plumbers”) more than the results for geo-modified terms (“edmonton plumbers”). The differences we’re seeing are likely due to relevancy for the geo-modified term. So for instance, the websites may have more anchor text targeting the term “Edmonton plumbers,” or the overall content on the site has more references to Edmonton plumbers.

How does proximity impact local organic results?

Localized organic results are the blue links that list businesses, directories, etc, under the local pack. We’re seeing some very minor differences in the results, but relatively consistent local organic rankings across the city.

Generally, localized organic results are consistent no matter where you’re located in a city — which is a strong indication of traditional ranking signals (links, reviews, citations, content, etc) that outweigh proximity when it comes to local organic results.

Here are screenshots of the local organic results:

Proximity is the New Top Local Search Ranking Factor from Darren Shaw

Some observations

1. Non geo-modified searches (keyword only) can pull results from neighboring cities. In the new local packs, proximity to searcher is not affected by the city you are in, but by the radius of the searcher. This does not appear to be the same for a geo-modified term — when you add a city to the search. This tells us that the #1 local search ranking factor from the Local Search Ranking Factors survey, “Physical address in city of search,” may no longer be as important as it once was.
   
2. Results sometimes cluster together. Even though there may be businesses closer to the searcher, it seems like Google prefers to show you a group of businesses that are clustered together.
   
3. Google would rather show a smaller pack than a 3-pack when there is a business that’s too far away from the searcher. For example: I only get a 2-pack of nearby businesses here, but I know there are at least 5 other businesses that match this search term:
   
4. Probably obvious, but if there aren’t many businesses in the category, then Google will return a wider set of results from all over the city:
   

Why is Google doing this?

Why is Google giving so much ranking strength to proximity and reducing the impact of traditional local search ranking factors?

To sell more ads, of course.

I can think of three ways that this will increase ad revenue for Google:

1. If it’s harder to get into the organically driven local packs, then businesses will need to pay to get into their fancy new paid local packs.
2. Back in the day, there was one local pack per city/keyword combo (example: “edmonton plumbers”). Now there are thousands of local packs across the city. When they create a new pack every mile, they drastically increase their available “inventory” to sell ads on.
3. When the results in the 3-pack aren’t giving you what you want, then a click into “more places” will bring up the Local Finder, where Google is already displaying ads:
   
4. (Bonus) And have you noticed that the new local ad packs focus on “nearby”? The local ads and the local pack results are increasingly focused on how close the businesses are to your physical location.

Though I don’t think it’s only for the additional ad revenue. I think they truly believe that returning closer businesses is a better user experience, and they have been working on improving their technology around this for quite some time.

Way back in 2012, Whitespark’s Director of Local Search, Nyagoslav Zhekov, noted in the 2012 Local Search Ranking Factors survey that proximity of business location to the point of the searcher was his top local ranking factor. He says:

“What really matters, is where the searcher is physically located and how close the potentially relevant search results are. This ranking factor is getting further boost by the importance of local-mobile search, where it is undoubtedly #1. For desktop search the factor might not be as important (or not have any significance) if searcher’s location and the location for which the search is intended differ.”

It is interesting to note that in today’s results, as we can see in the examples in this post, proximity is now a huge ranking factor on desktop as well. Google has been going “mobile-first” for years, and I’m starting to think that there is no difference in how they process mobile and desktop local results. You just see different results because Google can get a more precise location on mobile.

Furthermore, Bill Slawski just published a post about a recently approved Google patent for determining the quality of locations based on travel time investment. The patent talks about using quality measures like reviews (both user and professional) AND travel time and distance from the searcher (time investment) to rank local businesses in search results.

One excerpt from the patent:

“The present disclosure is directed to methods and apparatus for determining the quality measure of a given location. In some implementations, the quality measure of a given location may be determined based on the time investment a user is willing to make to visit the given location. For example, the time investment for a given location may be based on comparison of one or more actual distance values to reach the given location to one or more anticipated distance values to reach the given location. The actual distance values are indicative of actual time of one or more users to reach the given location and the anticipated distance values are indicative of anticipated time to reach the given location.”

The patent was filed in May 2013, so we can assume that Google may have been experimenting with this and incorporating it into local search for at least the past 3 to 4 years. In the past year, the dial seems to have been cranked up on this factor as Google gets more distance and travel data from Android users and from users of the Google Maps app on other mobile platforms.

These results suck

It seems to me that in most business categories, putting so much emphasis on proximity is a pretty poor way to rank results. I don’t care if a lawyer is close to me. I am looking to hire a lawyer that’s reputable, prominent in my city, and does good work. I’m perfectly happy to drive an extra 20 minutes to go to the office of a good lawyer. I’m also looking for the best pizza in town, not the cardboard they serve at the place down the street. The same applies for every business category I can think of, outside of maybe gas stations, emergency plumbers, or emergency locksmiths.

In my opinion, this emphasis on proximity by Google seriously downgrades the quality of their local results. People are looking for the best businesses, not the closest businesses. If this is the new normal in Google’s local results, I expect that people will start turning to sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Avvo, Angie’s List, etc. when searching for businesses. I already have.

So what about local rank tracking?

Most local rank trackers set the location to the city, which is the equivalent of setting it to the centroid. It is very likely that the local pack and local finder results reported in your rank tracker will be different from what the business or client sees when they search. To get more accurate results, you should use a rank tracker that lets you set the location by zip/postal code (hint hint, Whitespark’s Local Rank Tracker).

You should also realize that you’re never going to get local rank tracking reports that perfectly match with what the person sitting in the city sees. There are just too many variables to control for. The precise proximity to the searcher is one thing a rank tracker can’t exactly match, but you’ll also see differences based on device used, browser version, personalization, and even time of day as results can and do change by the hour.

Use your rank tracking reports as a measure of general increases and decreases in local visibility, not as an exact match with what you would see if you were searching from within city.

How does this affect local SEO strategies?

Local SEO is not dead. Far from it. It’s just more competitive now. The reach your business can have in local results is smaller than it used to be, which means you need to step up your local organic and optimization efforts.

• Local search practitioners, if you’re seeing traffic and rankings going down in your local SEO reporting and you need to answer to your clients on this, you’re now armed with more info on how to answer these questions. It’s not you, it’s Google. They have reduced the radius that your business will be shown in the search results, so you’re going to be driving less traffic and leads from local pack results.
• If you want your business to rank in the pack or local finder, you will need to crank up the dial on your optimization efforts.
• Get on those local organic opportunities (content and links). There is less pack real estate for you now, but the localized organic results are still great city-wide opportunities. The local organic results are currently localized to the city, not the searcher location. We can see this in all the terms.
• Look for outliers. Study the businesses that are getting pulled into the local rankings from a far distance from the searcher. What are they doing in terms of content, links, reviews, and mentions that helps them appear in a wider radius than other businesses?
• Diversify your local optimization efforts beyond Google. Make sure you’re on Yelp, BBB, TripAdvisor, Avvo, Angie’s List, etc, and that your profiles are claimed, optimized, and enhanced with as much information as possible. Then, make sure you’re driving reviews on THESE sites rather than just Google. If the local pack results are crap, a lot of people will click Yelp’s 10 Best XYZ list, for example. You want to be on that list. The more reviews you get on these sites, the better you will rank in their internal search results, and as people desert Google for local business recommendations because of their low-quality results, you’ll be ready and waiting for them on the other sites.

The tighter radius might mean less local search pie for the more dominant businesses in the city, but don’t despair. This opens up opportunities for more businesses to attract local search business from their local neighborhood, and there is still plenty of business to drive through local search if you step up your game.

Have you also noticed hyper-localized local pack results? I would love to hear about your examples and thoughts in the comments.

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