In these uncertain times businesses of all sizes have been impacted and the pandemic is industry agnostic. We don’t know how long this crisis will last. Social distancing has become the new buzzword and Work From Home (WFH) has suddenly become the new normal.

So how do we as marketers react to this crisis? It certainly isn’t the time to run the same campaigns we were running prior to the Covid-19 onslaught. But that doesn’t mean that we should stop all campaigns & wait for the crisis to tide over either.

In Australia and globally the business environment has shifted radically in the space of a few weeks. All conferences and events have been banned by the government and since WFH is the new normal, this means there is very little traffic on the road. Think about this, if your company was spending money on outdoor advertising/transit media such as airports/stations, with people reducing travel and staying indoors, isn’t it time to shuffle the spend and take advantage of the digital medium.

In certain industries like travel/tourism/events/entertainment/hotels/airlines/retail/restaurants/car dealerships/sports/movies, sales have collapsed and therefore their marketing departments have hit the pause button.

Even if sales have fallen off the cliff, you can still use content marketing to connect with your audience and keep your brand in front of your target market. Right now, when a lot of people are sitting at home and have the bandwidth to consume content, it is the right time to create appropriate content. This will help your brand rebound quickly once the crisis is over, and over it will be for sure. A vaccine will be developed & the economy will rebound.

Competitive Advantage

Brands across the board have cut back staff and marketing. This is the right time to multiply your content marketing activities and leapfrog your competition.

Experiment With Online

This is an ideal time for some businesses that have focussed on offline events like Conferences, Seminars, Training, Round tables etc to reinvent themselves. AMI is a perfect example of an organisation that is doing this pivot during these uncertain times. Here is a recent announcement they made in view of the covid-19 impact:

“For this reason, we have made the decision to reformat all live events and AMI Professional Development as online events via virtual classroom until further notice.”

Here are some of the online content marketing activities that can be practiced/implemented or enhanced due to the Coronavirus scenario.

Content Rich Website – Ensure your website is up to date with all the latest info about your brand. Have a content first strategy & ensure you create landing pages on your site that address topics your target audience is looking for. A content rich site will pay long term dividends. At the Forward Marketing Summit that I recently attended in Sydney, I was pleased to hear Natalie Miller from Business Australia talk about their Content First approach for their website. This has resulted in 700 articles answering commonly asked questions about Business in Australia and a huge increase in visibility on Google & organic traffic to the website.

Blog – Have a blog as part of your website where you write thought leadership articles. Additionally, tips, case studies and white papers also work really well. Make sure you host your blog on your website as this has significant SEO benefits.

Social Media Posts – There are a myriad social media channels out there, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook Instagram, Pinterest & more. When you are starting out it is important that you select the right channel for your brand. For example, if you are a B2B brand, LinkedIn probably makes much more sense than Facebook.

Webinars – I believe this is going to be a huge competitive advantage for those brands that can quickly adapt their marketing strategy to include this medium. Turn face-to-face events into a digital experience via a webinar. Make the webinars available “on demand” because most people are busy during the day to rock up to live webinars. Make the webinar experience interactive and let the audience join the conversation: use polls, videos, Q&A etc.

Influencer Marketing – Using micro influencers & celebrities has become hugely popular with the exponential growth of social media. Right now, is a good time for you to tap into this segment as a number of these micro influencers are looking for work & have time on their hands. Remember, if you go down this path, you must disclose the collaboration.  

Video Content – Today everyone has access to video cameras via their mobile phone. It is very easy for your brand to create video content. Don’t let the idea that the video needs to be high quality or have a big budget stop you from experimenting with this medium. Product reviews, how-to and unboxing videos are the most popular types of videos on YouTube.

A travel portal, ixigo has used this medium very successfully and their videos have had over 28 Million views on YouTube alone. I just checked out their channel and noticed they have already made content appropriate for the covid-19 crisis & their brand. Here is a video on “How to Make A Mask At Home”.

SEO – What is the first thing customers do when they need to buy a house, car, mobile phone, go on vacation, dine out at a restaurant or even look for a job? They do a Google Search. Therefore, use this time to ramp up your SEO program.

Marketing Breadcrumb Strategy

We know that your brand’s story is unfolding across multiple customer touch points and it takes 7 touches to turn a buyer into a customer. We also know that this journey differs from customer to customer. As marketers we need to know where our customers are looking for information and ensure our brand is present at these pit stops.

I believe right now is the perfect time to connect these dots within your customer’ journey. Write thought leadership articles in your industry, create video content, engage with your customers via social media posts so that when potential customers search for information, your brand pops up in these searches. Your intent should be to create useful information that increases your brands relevance and when the potential customer is ready to take the plunge you are their number 1 destination!

I call this the “breadcrumb strategy”. Drop enough breadcrumbs in your niche that your target audience automatically finds their way to your door!

“As marketers and brand custodians, we are like Hansel and Gretel, and it is our job to leave enough breadcrumbs in our customer’s digital journey so that they find their way to our brand!”
-Sid Lal

When will this crisis get over? I don’t know and my Tasseography is weak. So, If I were you, I would take this opportunity to ramp up content marketing.

On a more general note, use this time to learn new skills or enrol your team in online training. If you can, I would also encourage you to donate your time/resources to other small businesses & help them in their time of need. Karma is a big leveller & this good deed will repay you many times over in the future.

Note: This post was originally published in the Australian Marketing Institute website:

https://marketingvoice.ami.org.au/content-marketing-in-the-age-of-coronavirus/

Caroline Hugall of IAG suggests one leading approach is to embed the brand’s purpose and identity in the marketing. Examples of brand purpose we were given show the importance of keeping the purpose and identity simple, such as Patagonia (the environment), Cadbury’s (joy) and Nike (inspiration).

I’ve done my own research into some of these brands to see how they have developed their branding. Taking Patagonia as an example, the environmental brand identity is visible from the outset in the website, with a video of outdoor adventure and the second link on the site being to the company’s environmental activism efforts. In 2017, Patagonia released its first ever television ad and rather than focussing on a new line of apparel, a sale or the like, it instead focussed on the importance of protecting American public lands.  In the lead up to the Black Friday sales in 2019, Patagonia released an ad telling customers not to buy a Patagonia jacket, unless they really need it. On top of that, the company devoted all sales on Black Friday to environmental causes.

According to the Accenture Strategy Global Consumer Pulse survey 2018, 62% of consumers believe companies should stand up for issues they are passionate about and 66% highly value transparency in branding. The Don’t Buy This Jacket campaign clearly shows a brand identity strongly aligned with sustainability, recycling, and care for the environment. Giving Black Friday proceeds to environmental causes could also help people self-justify spending money on items they may not need.  With this campaign, Patagonia has effectively marketed a lifestyle and ethos seemingly at the expense of their own brand, but has strengthened their brand identity with both new and established consumers. Keeping the brand identity simple and focussed in one area (or a few closely related areas) can help in both brand building and creating a relationship with the consumer.

Being authentic with the branding and identity is extremely important when it comes to maintaining the trust of customers. Trust is hard to gain but extremely easy to lose, especially in an era of heightened consumer expectations. Building trust can be achieved in a number of different ways but authenticity, consistency and transparency form the basis of a good trust building approach. Authenticity should permeate every level of your company, not just the marketing, as saying one thing but practicing another is a sure way to lose trust. Say, for example, a company markets itself as being devoted to equality (perhaps to coincide with Pride or another celebration of diversity) but has a history of overlooking women for promotion or discriminating against LGBTQI employees. This is a sure way to lose trust from a consumer base. If the company, however, practiced what they preached, then trust could be built with the customers.

Consistency and transparency are the other two pillars on which trust can be build when building a brand identity. Being on message in all content, like the overall environmental bent in the case of Patagonia, or being consistent when it comes to customer experience can all aid in consumers developing trust in a brand. Being transparent not only means showing the ethos of the brand, but owning up to mistakes and responding to complaints.

INFLUENCER MARKETING

Influencer culture has become more and more prevalent with the exponential growth of Youtube, and to a lesser extent, Twitch, Influencer marketing has become more and more prevalent. How influencers are utilized can grossly effect trust in a brand. Oporto utilized influencer marketing when launching a vegan burger. Knowing they would most likely get some flack for launching a vegan burger in a chicken focused fast food chain, the chain chose to invite some of the most vocal haters to come in and eat the new burger. Before serving the burgers, they were first laser branded with the negative comments.

Influencers exist all across social media, but Instagram is a major centre of Influencer marketing, with beauty, travel and lifestyle being the focal point of a great deal of the marketing pushes. While clever influencer marketing, such as the Eat Your Words campaign can be effective, this relatively new avenue for marketing has its share of problems. Sponsored posts on social media and streaming/video services are required to carry a disclaimer that content is sponsored as well as any other codes or indicators as required by law. Many influencers have failed to do this on posts. Influencer marketing company, CollectivEdge found that in 2018, only 38% of brand sponsored posts were disclosed as ads or paid for collaborations.  The lack of disclosure can and will damage the reputation and brand authenticity of both the sponsoring brand and influencer, as well as legal problems.

Similarly, tying a brand to an influencer can also tie a brand identity to that of the influencer. While this can undoubtedly have positive effects, it can also have repercussions if the influencer acts in an inappropriate way. Take for example the immensely popular social media mogul and influencer, Kendall Jenner. Jenner boasts over 120 million Instagram followers and pulls in around $16 million USD a year in sponsored posts. Her reach is obviously very attractive to a number of brands, but this has backfired a number of times. Pepsi chose the very recognizable Kendall Jenner as the face of a 2017 advertising campaign but came under fire for trivializing Black Lives Matter, whitewashing an act of defiance by an African American woman, and pretending that one of the richest celebrities in the world has a grass roots social conscience. Pepsi quickly pulled the campaign.

Also in 2017 Jenner became one of the public faces of the disastrous Fyre Festival. Jenner and a number of other model/influencers including Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski were paid up to $250,000 USD per post to advertise the upcoming music festival. Jenner did this with a single post garnering almost 6 million views before it was deleted. The post touted the music lineup at the festival, hinted that Jenner’s brother-in-law Kanye West might be a performer and offered a discount code for tickets. Not only was the event a disaster, Jenner also neglected to disclose that the post was sponsored, leading to a subpoena as well as the organisers and influencers being sued for “negligent misrepresentation, fraud, breach of contract for failing to ‘provide the festival experience as promised’ as well as ‘misrepresentations’ that caused people to purchase tickets.”

CONTENT FIRST APPROACH

It’s no wonder that some brands are gun-shy about influencer marketing. During a panel on the subject, both Penny Parkinson, CMO of Vet Matters and Natalie Miller, Head of Brand and Communications at the NSW Business Chamber (formerly the NSW Chamber of Commerce) have avoided influencer marketing. Instead, Miller has adopted a web first marketing strategy based around heavily searched content. While she never explicitly used the term SEO during her panel, the NSW Business Chamber approach is SEO through and through. The content rich site currently contains around 700 articles answering commonly asked questions or search terms, such as, “how much should I pay an intern?” or “workplace advice line”.

In my experience, the first step to both establishing an authentic brand identity and effectively marketing that brand is to understand your customer. This is especially true when optimising SEO. In a panel on B2B Brand Awareness Strategy, one of the panellists, Robin Marchant, Head of marketing, APAXC for Shopify Plus used the example of trying to market software to medical practises. The assumption was made that people would be searching for “health software” but that didn’t work as the target market were those managing the clinics, so they were searching for “practise management software”.

People are always hungry for content. People are looking for tips. Listicles work well, case studies, whitepapers. You should put together content that will make your customers look good, but should always consider the target audience or market. By using SEO techniques, knowing the market and researching what that market will be searching for, I have managed to raise and keep my 2018 Digital Marketing Ted talk to the top of Google.

For more Forward Marketing Summit 2020 posts, check out Technology and Innovation and Ecommerce.

While the way search results are shown hasn’t changed, the amount of data created online, and the sheer amount of content has skyrocketed in 20 years. Both supply and demand have grown exponentially, but the sweet spot for content is still being in one of those first 10 links on Google.

Perhaps an easier way to visualise how rapidly the amount of content available is growing is with a graph.

Exactly how much content is created online? In 2015, the global accumulated online data was around 4.4ZB (Zettabytes – a zettabyte is 10²¹ bytes), and by the end of 2020 the amount of accumulated data is expected to have increased tenfold to 44ZB. Such a massive amount of data is hard to visualise, but when the data was first released, the example given was that if you stacked 128Gb iPad Air tablets on top of each other, a 4.4ZB stack would make it two thirds of the way to the moon. A 44ZB stack would make it to the moon 6.6 times.

The digital world never slows, and the amount of data created by the minute, day and year is staggering.

So how do we, as marketers, break through the noise created by so much data? We have to make content that matters, not just for the hell of it. Every time we create content we have to ask if we are creating value for users. If we aren’t the content is just more data that is being thrown on the pile.

If content already exists on the topic, you have to think about how we can improve on the topic or bring something new and valuable to the table. Each piece of content should be hero content, not filler. This hero content could include creating video or graphics to illustrate your text, adding interest and value to readers, and giving added context and accessibility to content you create.

Another way you can add value to your content to rise to the top of the data pile is to create vernacular content. In the United States, it could be valuable to create content in both English and Spanish, given the large Spanish speaking population. In India where there are 22 regional languages, including Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil and Urdu, it could be beneficial to create content for those regional groups and languages to better reach those audiences.

Ultimately, the key to ranking is having quality content and knowing how people search.

You can download the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines by right clicking the link.

Data Sources

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics

WordPress: https://wordpress.com/about/

Facebook: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/21/how-much-data-do-we-create-every-day-the-mind-blowing-stats-everyone-should-read/#40162f2560ba

https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau/,

https://research.fb.com/blog/2014/10/facebook-s-top-open-data-problems/

Twitter: https://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/

https://business.twitter.com/en/blog/how-video-is-reshaping-digital-advertising.html

Youtube: https://www.tubefilter.com/2019/05/07/number-hours-video-uploaded-to-youtube-per-minute/

https://www.youtube.com/about/press/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/12/18/the-highest-paid-youtube-stars-of-2019-the-kids-are-killing-it/#2510e13838cdS

Instagram: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/

https://www.facebook.com/business/marketing/instagram#

Google: https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/

Email: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=YxOKDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT164&lpg=PT164&dq=103+million+spam+emails+are+sent&source=bl&ots=OqwWE4M-Wq&sig=ACfU3U35mp9cOoQsf18ZbDU2xmt2yR6IMg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjZnL7iopboAhXKyTgGHX3NB4cQ6AEwDHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=103%20million%20spam%20emails%20are%20sent&f=false

https://www.statista.com/statistics/456500/daily-number-of-e-mails-worldwide/

Reddit:https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/reddit-outlines-2019-performance-stats-and-trends/568471/

Medium: https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/medium-facts-statistics/

In this example we are using the website b2w.tv and using SEMrush we will be looking at insights that will help us understand the domain better. When you put the domain into the URL bar there are two things you have to pay attention to – the first being that the page is Domain Overview, and the second being that you have selected the right database to crawl for analysis. In the case of b2w.tv, we are looking at the US database, but there are multiple other country options you can look at for domain reporting if needed.

Domain Overview

The Domain Overview will then show you relevant domain statistics for that database, with information on Organic Search, Paid Search, Back links, Display Advertising, Organic Keywords by location, Paid Keywords and Organic Position Distribution.

A quick glance shows us that the site has recently massively increased the spending on paid searches, as indicated both the Paid Search number and the orange line in the Organic and Paid graph. The overview also clearly shows that the site hasn’t had much increase in traffic in two years, with a few periods of higher search ranking around May of 2018 and 2019. Discovering what has happened around these times of relatively higher traffic can be a first step to helping a site achieve better search ranking and traffic.

Keep in mind that this information is not necessarily accurate. I’ve done a lot of studies on traffic for clients I know or have access to through their Google Analytics, and when compared it to similar tools like SEMrush, Alexa or something similar the results were sometimes accurate and sometimes extremely inaccurate, under reporting traffic as much as -80% or over predicting traffic by as much as 150%. There is a massive range for discrepancy, so you have to take the numbers with a grain of salt without outside confirmation.

Organic Position Distribution

One of my favourite parts of the overview is the Organic Position Distribution. This shows the first 100 positions – the first 10 pages of Google – and how many keywords the database has discovered that rank on Google. This is important because it shows us what opportunities there are for this particular domain. Anything which is not on the first page of Google – positions 1-3 which are above the fold and positions 4-10 which are below the fold – is not driving traffic to the site.

The Organic Position Distribution in the case of b2w.tv shows us that there are about 110 keywords that are driving traffic and over 1000 that aren’t really doing anything. If you can understand what these keywords are and create strategies to drive them towards the first page you can massively increase traffic flow.

To the left of the Organic Position Distribution is a list of the top five Organic Keywords that are driving traffic to the site. The number one keyword, “evolution of animation” has a monthly search volume of 210 and accounts for 22% of traffic to the site. Using these stats we can also predict monthly site traffic. Having a search volume of 210 and assuming a click-through rate of about 30% for this first position keyword you can assume about 30-60 clicks.

Competitive Positioning Map

The Competitive Positioning Map shows the sites that are competitors on keyword rankings and how they are performing in relation to your domain. As the graph shows, b2w.tv is sitting around 1.6k keywords and 445 traffic. Their biggest competitor, rawshorts.com has far more well ranking keywords with 3.4k and 4.6k traffic.

Organic Keywords

After I look at the overview, I then like to take a closer look at the Organic Keywords. You can sort these results by Search Volume, showing the number of Google searches for that particular term. In the case of b2w.tv, the top result is “animation video maker”. This is a relatively high volume search term with 5400 monthly searches but unfortunately the domain only ranks as position 18 on Google so there is very little traffic coming from the term, with it delivering only 16 clicks. If we can increase the positioning on Google the keyword will drive a lot more traffic.

By sorting the results by Traffic you can see which searches are actually delivering concrete results. The first ten or so results account for about 70% of traffic and here we can identify some avenues to increase the performance of some keywords. The keyword, “cartoon animation maker”, has about 2900 searches a month but the site is only on page 3 of Google so there is very little traffic coming through. “Whiteboard video maker” is also a good opportunity. B2w.tv ranks at 5 for the term – the first page of Google. There are about 390 searches a month for the keyword, so improving rankings will allow b2w.tv to grab more traffic from that search.

On the other hand, the keyword “commercial maker” has a decent volume but I’m not entirely sure what it means in this context. What I’d usually do in a case like this is go to Google and do a search on that term to find the type of websites that appear, because if the first page searches aren’t related to video creation then it may not be a keyword ripe for pursuing.

Clicking on Overview in the Organic Keywords bring up a graph showing the number of keywords ranking and the traffic trend for those keywords.

Organic Competitors

The Organic Competitors list can be used to show both relative positioning among competitors but also their keyword usage. Keep in mind that there may be some entries in the list that aren’t actual competitors but instead simply share some keywords. In this instance, the number one competitor of b2w.tv is listed as Wikipedia as it will most likely have all of the keywords that b2w.tv uses and will rank higher, but since it doesn’t actually make videos, we can safely ignore it. Similarly we can rule out Quora and YouTube.

Rawshorts.com is the most direct competitor by the looks of the graph. If we click on it the domain is added to the URL bar and we can then look at the Estimated Traffic Trend and keywords that are driving traffic. In the case of rawshorts.com, a lot of traffic seems to be coming from their branding, so that’s not much use. Their third largest traffic driver, “animation maker”, has definite possibilities for b2w.tv. Rawshorts.com ranks at 29 on Google and is getting around 111 clicks from the search. “Animation maker” has a high search volume with around 74000 searches a month. If b2w.tv can get “animation maker” ranking high it could drive a lot of traffic their way. Other search terms like “promo video maker” and “whiteboard animator” also offer opportunities.

Keyword Research

Under Organic Research you can find the Keyword Gap tool. With this tool you can look at all of the keywords used by the domain you’re analysing and competitors. Choosing to search all keywords is best practise when looking for opportunities. Searching by common keywords allows you to see how you are performing compared to a competitor on shared keywords. This can be used to identify possible avenues to either pursue or abandon depending on your positioning and the strength of the rivals position.

These are only a few of the tools available in SEMrush, but it should give you a good overview on how it can be used for analysis of organic keywords on a domain. If you have any questions, post them in the comments below and I’ll answer them as soon as possible.

Have you ever searched for something for no results to be returned, or had so many results returned that it took forever to actually find the information you were after in the first place? Have you ever wondered how you can improve your Google search skills? I’ve been using Google professionally for a long time, and I’ve put together some Google tips and tricks to share, so you can be searching like a pro in no time.

These Google search operators, tips and tricks will save you time and help you find what you want. With a little practise, your colleagues and friends will start thinking of you as a Google wizard.

Inverted Commas

One of the most basic and powerful search tips is to use inverted commas when looking for a specific term. the quotation marks tell google to search for the whole phrase instead of the individual words, narrowing the search to very specific returns.

Example: “siddharth lal lessons”

This will search for my name and a keyword from my TED talk.

How do I use it?

Aside from ego surfing, searching with inverted commas is a great way to find very specific information, such as a person, a quote from a book, or a very specific product. Use inverted commas when you know exactly what you are looking for.

Command – Site:

This command limits the results to a specified domain. Use it to find out how many pages of your website have been indexed by Google – or if any pages are missing from the index – or if any page has been indexed multiple times thus causing duplicate content  issues. This is important because if your site actually has 1000 pages but Google has only indexed 200 pages, then you will  know that there is something wrong that needs to be fixed.

Example: site:yourdomain.com keyword

This will limit the results to the specified domain and a specific topic within this domain.

How do I use it?

Use this command for competitive intelligence and benchmarking, such as to find out how many pages on a specific topic are present on your competitor’s site. This will help you determine how much effort needs to be put to rank for a keyword.

You can also use this command to check all the pages within your site around a specific topic. You can then strategically start linking internally.

Command – Related:

How do I use it?

This command finds sites and pages with similar keywords and themes. In the above example we have searched for bruceclay.com. Unsurprisingly given the keywords used ont eh website, Google has uncovered 47 related sites, all of which deal with SEO and search marketing.

Command – OR

The Or: command tells Google to search for one thing or the other thing, delivering results for either or both search terms rather than just results with both search terms.

Example: coronavirus OR SARS

Pro Google Tip: The pipe operator: | can be used in place of OR in a search, so instead of writing coronavirus OR SARS you can write coronavirus|SARS.

Command – Inurl:

How do I use it?

An awesome use of this command is for Guest Posting.

Example: Let’s say as part of your brand building efforts you want to increase your brand’s visibility on the Internet by finding websites that allow guest posting.

Use the “inurl” command like this:

inurl:guest post or inurl:submit guest post

Google will now show you websites that allow guest posting.

Tip > Combine two advanced search commands to further refine your search results to websites that allow guest posting on a specified topic, such as

inurl:submit guest blog intitle:marketing

Google will now show you marketing related websites that allow guest posting.

Conversions

When performing conversions from Imperial to Metric, one currency to another, Celsius to Fahrenheit and the like, most people will search for a website or utility to perform that function, but Google already has all those conversion built in. All you need to do is type the conversion you want.

Example: 42 celsius to Fahrenheit

Example: 50 mile to km

Example: USD to AUD

Command – allintitle: or intitle:

How do I use it?

You can use advanced search commands like “allintitle:” and “intitle:” to select content on topics you are writing or researching about.

You can also use this command to find your competitors.

Example: Let’s say you are writing about “content marketing” and want to find all posts around this topic. Use the following search command:

allintitle:“content marketing examples” or intitle:”content marketing tips”

Tip > Adding inverted commas to the search command will further narrow your search to only include search results that have the exact match phrase as part of the title.

Command – Cache:

Ever wondered how Google sees your web page?

Use this command to see the search engine’s cached version of your web page. This will show you what information about your webpage is in Google’s index.

Type this command directly into the search bar:

cache:coles.com.au

Another neat benefit of this command is that it shows you when Google checked your web page last.

a. If it has been a long time since Google last visited your web page, it might be an indication that you don’t refresh your web page with new content often enough.

b. If you have updated your content and Google has not crawled your page, then you must  send a signal to Google to come and crawl your web page so that it gets updated in the  Google index.

Calculator

Did you know you can perform most basic calculations right in the Google search bar? Using the following commands: +, -, /, x will add, subtract, divide or multiply your searched numbers.

Example: 435 x 3.14

Google performs the calculation automatically for you int he search bar, but if you hit enter, it launches the Google scientific calculator for further, more in depth calculation.

Command – Filetype:

How do I use it?

If you’re searching for a particular file type, rather than trawling through innumerable pages you can narrow your search by using the filetype: command after your search term. Say you were looking for Power Point presentations pertaining to SEO. You can type the following command into the search bar:

Seo filetype:PPT

Searches can be made more specific. FOr example, if you were looking for PDFs on bruceclay.com you could search:

Bruceclay.com filetype:PDF

The following file types can be searched using the filetype: command.

• Adobe Flash (.swf)
• Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (.ps)
• Autodesk Design Web Format (.dwf)
• Google Earth (.kml, .kmz)
• GPS eXchange Format (.gpx)
• Hancom Hanword (.hwp)
• HTML (.htm, .html, other file extensions)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx)
• Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
• OpenOffice presentation (.odp)
• OpenOffice spreadsheet (.ods)
• OpenOffice text (.odt)
• Rich Text Format (.rtf)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)
• TeX/LaTeX (.tex)
• Text (.txt, .text, other file extensions), including source code in common programming languages:
• Basic source code (.bas)
• C/C++ source code (.c, .cc, .cpp, .cxx, .h, .hpp)
• C# source code (.cs)
• Java source code (.java)
• Perl source code (.pl)
• Python source code (.py)
• Wireless Markup Language (.wml, .wap)
• XML (.xml)

Command – Inposttitle:

How do I use it?

If you’re doing blog research, you can use this command to searching for blog posts with the key words in post titles. This can be useful when looking to find a unique name for a post or to find the trending search titles for posts on a topic.E

You can also use inposttitle with other advanced search terms to further narrow the scope of the search.

Example: site:medium.com inposttitle:search marketing

Command – intext: or allintext:

How do I use it?

The intext: command searches for a specific word somewhere on the page, whether it be the on screen text, URL or the title. You can combine this with a general search to focus your search.

Example: bruce clay intext:statistics

This searches for pages dealing with Bruce Clay featuring the word statistics.

The allintext command searches for a string of words on a page.

Example: allintext:bruce clay statistics

This search returns pages that contain the three searched key words.   

The allintext command can also be used for a basic plagiarism or duplicated content search. By choosing an identifiable and unique phrase from your content and turning it into a specific search using inverted commas, you can discover if Google is indexing any other pages with that exact phrase on it.

Example: allintext:“Google is one of the most powerful tools available to us when it comes to marketing and brand awareness”

Command + or –

Including a + or – command in your Google search will add or subtract a search term, respectively.

If you’re searching for specific information on a person, place, company or the like, then using the + command can limit searches to X search + Y parameter.

Example: Bruce Clay +Google

The – command tells Google to specifically search for something excluding the targeted keyword or parameter, allowing you, for example, to search for information about a company without the company’s own website appearing.

Example: Bruce Clay -bruceclay.com

Command – Location:

How do I use it?

The location: command restricts searches to a specific geographic location, only querying sources from that specific location.

Example: Bruce Clay Location:Sydney

Limiting a search to a location can be valuable when researching how specific topics are covered in a territory, what local search terms are trending or if you’re looking to make an impact with vernacular content.

Command – Inanchor: or Allinanchor:

The inanchor and allinanchor commands restrict Google to searching for pages that contain the search term or terms in the anchor text – the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.

How do I use it?

The inanchor command will search for a keyword in the anchor text.

Example: inanchor:SEO best practices

This search will look for any page with the words SEO, best or practices in the anchor text for that page. leaving us with a large number of results.

The allinanchor command further limits the search by looking for all the keywords specified in the search in the anchor text.

Example: allinanchor:seo best practices

This search returns far fewer results as we require every page returned to contain the three search terms in the anchor text.

The search can be further refined by placing the search term in inverted commas, making google search for that exact phrase.

Example: allinanchor:”seo best practices”

The inanchor and allinanchor commands are useful for identifying guest posting and potential outreach opportunities.

Example: “guest post” inanchor:contact

This search looks for the term guest post and anchor text containing contact, identifying guest posting contact pages.