You already know how to use Google and you probably use it every day. So do your prospects, your customers, your employees and your competitors.
You may ask “How can I use Google and their offerings to attract more and better qualified leads?”
In upcoming posts I’ll cover many of the tools Google offers to help grow your business and specifically to attract more and better qualified leads.
Think of your web presence as a marketing hub with your web site as the center. Inbound marketing focuses on attracting new business because customers seem to be getting better-and-better at ignoring the traditional marketing “interruptions”. More on inbound marketing, here.
Let’s start with Advanced Google Search and some small tips that can help a lot. These are useful not just for doing searches, but also for tools like Google Alerts (which we discuss later).
If you are like most people, you simply type in a search term or phrase into Google. You hope to get what you are looking for and if you don’t you simply type in different words.
However, there is a whole lot more you can do. You can use search modifiers that tell Google more about what you’re looking for. Here are some of the more useful modifiers I have found helpful.
Explicit Phrases:
Let’s say you are looking for content about Business Relationship development. Instead of just typing in the phrase in the Google box, you will likely be better off searching explicitly for the phrase. To do this, simply enclose the search phrase with double quotes.
Example: “business relationship development”
Exclude Words:
If you want to search content about business relationship development, but you want to exclude any results that containt the term “advertising”, simply use the “-” (hyphen) infront of the word you want to exclude.
Example: Business relationship development -advertising
Site Specific Search:
Let’s say you want to search a specific web site for content that matches a certain phrase. Even if the site doesn’t support a built-in search feature, you can use Google to search the site for your term. Simply use the “site:sitename.com” modifier.
Example and results:
Try this on your web site or a competitors!
Similar Words and Synonyms:
If you want to include a word in your search, and also want to include results that contain similar words, or synonyms, use the “~” (tilde) in front of the word.
Example: “Business relationship development” ~CRM
Specific Document Types:
Let’s say you’re looking to find results of a specific type, you can use the modifier “filetype:”. For example, you might want to find only PDF documents related to Business relationship development.
Example: “business relationship development” filetype:PDF
Finding This OR That:
By default, when you do a search, Google will include all the terms specified in the search. If you are looking for one or more terms to match, then you can use the OR operator. Note: The OR has to be capitalized.
Example:
Business relationship development OR CRM
Check out the HubSpot blog post ” href=”http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/1264/12-Quick-Tips-To-Search-Google-Like-An-Expert.aspx” target=”_blank”>“12 Quick Tips to Search Google Like An Expert” for additional tips.
Next time we’ll cover monitoring with Google Alerts- like a personal assistant. This is a great way to be notified of content relating to your industry, your ideas customers and your competitors. What you learned today can be applied in that monitoring.
Gain more expertise. Learn more to become an Inbound Marketing Certified Professional, here.
