Google Search Operators for SEO: Indexing, Competitors and Links

So far we've learned each operator on its own.

Today there's no new operator. Today we work.

Every part of this lesson is a real SEO task: the question, the query that answers it, how to read the results, and what to do with them.

And notice something: nobody memorizes these recipes. What makes the difference is starting from the question, and picking the operator that answers it.

1. Does Google know my site's pages?

Say you're the SEO at eBay, and you want to know what Google knows of the landing pages we saw in the site lesson.

Open the results and look at what they are, not how many. Remember from the site lesson that the number is an estimate.

What you're looking for: pages that shouldn't be in Google. Internal search pages, empty tags, or pages with the same content. For example, on your site:

If you find hundreds of tag pages with two articles each, that's thin content Google is wasting its time on.

2. Two pages competing for the same phrase

If you have two pages built for the same phrase, they can compete with each other instead of with your competitors.

You'll find "Wooden Manual Coffee Grinder", "Manual Coffee Grinder" on its own, and other close variations. All with the same template.

The question to ask: does each one of them really serve a different search? Or is their content almost the same? If it's almost the same, open Search Console and see whether the two pages show up for the same queries.

3. What has the competitor written on the topic?

All of the competitor's articles with grinders in the title. Put them in a table: the title, the angle (a guide? A comparison? A review?), and what's missing from them.

And add the date from lesson 6 to see only what's new:

4. The competitors you don't see

Every market has big, obvious competitors, and smaller ones hidden under them. Those are usually the closest to you.

You dropped the big stores, so what's under them showed up: specialist shops and coffee blogs. Open each one and ask: is it targeting the same audience? What is it better at than me?

5. Opportunities to write for another site

Lots of sites publish a page called "write for us" where they ask for writers. That's a chance to write an article and get a link to your site.

Don't accept just any site. Check: is the site in your field? Does it publish real content, or only paid posts? Does it get traffic from Google? A link from a weak site, or one with nothing to do with your field, can hurt more than it helps.

6. Where was my brand mentioned?

This is one of the most important tasks, and one of the least work. Let's try it on a real brand: Peet's Coffee.

Read it as: every page that mentioned "Peet's", except Peet's own site.

Look at the Target page: it says "peets", with no apostrophe. And in the simulation it didn't show up.

Real Google often treats Peet's and Peets the same. But don't rely on that for every form. A brand can be written more than one way:

News only, without the stores

Stores sell the product; that's expected. What matters more to you: who wrote about the brand. Exclude the stores:

And here's the real work: open each article and check whether it links to the brand's site. If it doesn't, that's called an unlinked mention. A site that already wrote about you is much easier to ask for a link than a site that's never heard of you.

And on social media?

People don't only write about a brand on websites. Most of the talk happens on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram.

And Google indexes public posts from those platforms. So it's the same site: we learned, only on the platform's domain:

Read it as: any public post with "Peet's", on any of the four platforms.

And if you want one platform, these are the domains:

Reddit and the groups especially. That's where people ask for real: "has anyone tried Peet's Major Dickason's?". Questions like that are ready-made content ideas.

What are people unhappy about?

Add complaint words, and keep it on social media:

That way you learn about the problems that keep coming up, before they grow. And that's customer service and SEO together: if a problem keeps coming up, write a page that answers it.

Only what's new

A brand mention from two years ago doesn't matter as much as one this week. And the period isn't an operator you type in the box; it's added to the link: tbs=qdr:w means the past week. You'll see it in detail in the next lesson.

And if you don't want to write all this, the search operator generator has a whole section called "Brand and social": you type the brand name, and the tool writes the query and picks the period.

7. What are people asking?

So your page answers the questions people are actually searching for:

Every title here is a question someone went to the trouble of writing a page for. Collect the questions, drop the duplicates, and pick the ones worth a subheading on your page.

And communities like Reddit have lots of discussions about hand grinders:

8. Trusted numbers for your content

From lesson 5:

And don't forget the four questions: who published it? When? What's the unit? What exactly does it measure?

Operators that stopped working

You'll find lots of old articles explaining Google operators that Google has switched off. If you try them you won't get results, so don't waste your time:

All the recipes in one table

The practical test

A thinking test

Your manager says: "I want to know who our competitors are." What do you type into Google?

Before you type any operator, the question itself isn't clear. Competitors in what?

A competitor on Google is whoever shows up for the queries you want to show up for. It could be a store, a blog, or a news site.

So start from the queries that matter to you, search with them, and see who keeps coming up. Then use site: and intitle: to understand what each competitor does.

The operators are tools. A clear question is what decides which tool to use.

Before the next lesson

Every query we've written went into the search box.

But some things don't go in the box: the country of the results, the language of the interface, and the time period from the "Tools" list. Those go in the results page's link itself. And that's the last lesson: we'll read the link and edit it by hand, and use the search operator generator in the course's final project.