Ok, I admit it, a lot has been written about this… But it turns out that when dealing with users I observe over and over again that people still don’t know how to search on Google.
The vast majority (well over 90%) do not go beyond entering one or several keywords to search for something in Google, at best, also clicking on the “Images” link to search for photos or images that correspond to those words.
This fact is also confirmed by the Google search statistics of our blog (in a WordPress blog or with tools like Google Analytics you can see through what searches people find you).
Hardly anyone uses the advanced features or “tricks” to search Google, even though these options are really easy to learn and use, and extremely powerful and useful.
The result is that, although on many occasions searching in a simple way by combining the keywords to search for leads you quite quickly to results that are worth it, you will also have observed that on many occasions it really costs you to find what you are looking for.
In addition, rank higher on Google maps 2022 not an easy task but it happens that many times the results are of a much lower quality than what you would need (and that you could have found knowing how to use the tricks that I am telling you about here).
So, given this scenario, we are going to return to this topic once again, but with a minimalist approach, without going into depth, but simply summarizing the “chicha”, those things that have proven to be really useful in practice.
The problems derived from searching on Google “like everyone else”
As I said above, not knowing how to take advantage of Google’s possibilities means, ultimately, that you miss out on a lot of information that might interest you.
If it’s worth getting 50% or less of its potential from Google and sometimes running out of results, well, don’t waste any more time with this post. But if you’re interested in really getting the most out of Google searches, I recommend you keep reading…
Before counting the tricks it is important to understand the problem well, so let me explain it to you for a moment.
The underlying problem is the gigantic amount of potential results that often moves in the order of millions of results, and the criteria with which Google tries to separate the grain from the chaff when only keywords are used to search without further ado.
In that sense, some of the most important problems would be these:
- Positioning distortion: In simple searches with a lot of competition, such as “cheap shoes”, many results are lost that are of very good quality, but not very relevant at the Google level (in reality, they are not lost, but they are on the umpteenth page of the page). the list).
- Lack of precision: On many occasions, simply combining words without more, it is difficult to clearly express what results are really being requested from Google.
- Excessive noise generates time wasting: Due to the gigantic size of the web and its content offer, it is normal that in any search there is a great excess of results and therefore a lot of noise (irrelevant or not very relevant results). This usually results in a lot of time being wasted before reaching the desired result.
- Poor quality sources: When searching simply with keywords, Google considers all existing sources, tries to apply positioning criteria so that the quality of the sites is reflected in their positioning, but this is an impossible task to achieve.
Google is not a fortune teller and there comes a time when it does not have enough information to know exactly what the user wants and refine the filtering of the results to the point that you need. Therefore, at that point, you have to help Google to do better, which is exactly the purpose of the list of tricks that we are going to see below.
Find something within a website with “site:” or exclude it with “-site”
This is, without a doubt, my favorite trick; I use it constantly, mainly for three things:
- Search for information on sites that are of my trust: I do this continuously with the posts. If I want to tackle a topic, I search good sites like Problogger or Social Media Examiner to see what they have written, get ideas and assess if my vision of the topic is complete enough.
- Search certain sites for posts to link to a post of mine: This includes this very blog because it just works so well that it’s the best method I know of for searching our own posts for candidates to link to a new one.
- Search forums and similar sites: This is one of the greatest graces that this method has because in my experience it turns out that, in general, Google works much better than the site’s own search engines. It seems ironic, but effectively using Google I usually get more relevant results (and easier) than with the search engines of these sites. In addition, you have another advantage, which is that you have to learn to use a single search engine, not 10 different search engines from the different sites you visit.
Suppose you are the owner of an Audi, a picky eater (like me…) and you have to do a sheet metal job. You want to make sure you get a flawless job.