Searches | Glenn Ward

Improve your searches – search engine tips and tricks

Many people still search one or two keywords and trawl through endless list of results in a search engine. Beyond the provided filter tools there are many tips and tricks to finding what you want quicker. Ever see the keyword you searched in the summary but arrive at page with 20 feet of scrolling. Hit Control F and search that page for that word and be there in seconds. Use and image search and come across sites that you wouldn’t usually have found.

The bulk of this post is about the little tips and tricks when actually entering text into the search bar.

Phrase search (“”) Use exclamation marks to make more than one keyword a phrase, the results shown will be results where these two words appear next to each other.

Site Search Site search is great for finding something you know appeared on a particular site. Often this search delivers better results that some website own search. Jus type site:thewebsite.com and then the keywords to only search one site.

Filetype Search As per site search but the results are specifically files with the file extension you specify, for example chocolate sweets filetype:pdf

Exclude a keyword (-) No brainer!

Wildcard Search (*) This constitutes anything and then your search term. If you only remember some of what you want to search use the wildcard, for example * sweets results in all types of search with a word then sweets.

Exact Search (+) Means that both your words must appear in the results, for example chocolate + sweets.

PPC – Pay Per Click Marketing and Purchase Process

Also see,
Understanding the science of PPC Digital Marketing

The other day I did an hour session on the use of Google Adwords and like most of my explanations related it back to conventional marketing practises and thinking about purchase process.

So, it is an extremely large subject and some might say its an art to perfect pay per click for a particular industry, product or brand. For more specifics on keywords and your campaigns see this article. If you break it down to it’s absolute basics and suggest some theory that could be applied to any campaign and in fact could be used to refine or revisit your existing campaign. The aim is to pick up your potential customer from an online space where you know they are specifically looking for something. Your advert should then suggest to them that you have what they are looking for, in as few steps as possible the customer will arrive in front of your product where they will find the right price and enough information to make a purchase decision. Of course it’s not that simple, product awareness often happens way before the online experience, the competing ads on the search engine may grab their attention more, they might feel you have the right price but not enough information to make an informed purchase decision or visa versa, they might research the product on your site but purchase from the cheapest vendor, they might even drop out during the checkout process. The point is that the drop out could occur at any point in the purchase process and so they are many important aspects to consider when designing your pay per click adverting and it’s not just about cleverly chosen key words and advert. You should also be looking at your SEO, landing pages, website content, price reviews, targeting, the list goes on! One is not successful without the other so think of PPC as a small part of your Digital Marketing Strategy.

I’ve written some beginners guides to SEO to here, which should also help with your landing page content.

Live Twitter results in Google Searches, potentially huge for your sites traffic

You might have noticed over the last few days on popular google searches that you are starting to get live Twitter feeds part way down the results. Google are rolling this out gradually but think of the possibilities. Topical Tweets and links will be getting instant first page google listing and in real time, the most up to date results on the page. Obviously this is open to abuse but the concept is great. Instantly the reach you have to your potential audience massively grows in size far beyond that of just the millions of Twitterers. I would be keen to see how this shows up in analytical software and if these links benefit your sites link building and link juicing in any way.