5 google search operators for real estate SEO in 2020

Google is the largest search engine with trillions of webpages crawled by its robots for serving most credible results to its users. It’s the most powerful search engine too with many useful search operators which can help you explore the seo status of your website and identify the problems in no time.

What’re the search operators?

Search operators are the special search queries that you run on google to find specific results. Google has the capabilities to return millions of results in milliseconds and rank them according to their relevance for the user.

At Agent360, we do search engine optimization for realtors with our seo experts to ensure that you outrank your competitors for most of your target keywords. So, here’s the list of the operators that’ll help you do more in less time.

#1 Know your Indexation errors

Majority of the websites have one thing in common- indexation errors. The most common error being indexing of a page that shouldn’t have indexed ideally.

You can find them by using an operator called site: on google search.

To find a specific set of pages on a website- say number of blog posts, you can run the below query:

 

Knowing that we haven’t published those many posts yet, this number is higher than actual. Digging deeper, we found that the below unwanted urls are crawled by google.

So how we tackled them was doing a 302 redirect to the actual desired url of this page and tackled to remove it from the SERP by no-indexing.

#2 Know your unsecured pages (without https)

If your website still doesn’t have https, you are losing on a big opportunity to be indexed properly by search engines. It’s no-longer being early adopters of ssl but a must have thing in 2020.

Have a look at the number of unsecured pages on a renowned sports news website returned by a simple search query- that’s a whopping 9.5 Million unsecured pages.

It’s the -inurl:https operator that excludes the secured pages (if any) and shows the remaining unsecured results.

 

#3 Find specific file types on your website

It’s damn hard to keep record of what all you uploaded on your website throughout its history and whether that’s relevant any longer.

So to search which all files that you uploaded and forgot about, you can search them via a filetype: search operator.

In the example below, we searched for the pdf filetypes on espn’s website which returned hundreds of results of the content that should be obsolete by now and shouldn’t exist on their website. Check the below screenshot for the same.

One you identify any such irrelevant outdated files, you may remove them and the associated google results for better SEO.

#4 Exclude specific words for your research

Needless to say, every website needs to be constantly updated to let google know the freshness of the content which is worth showing to the users. When you do a simple google search with your target keywords, you get the best results fetched based on many micro and macro factors.

A simple search query like real estate content marketing will return the best matching results.

But what if you were not looking out for the content highlighting ideas/ tips related to the subject matter.

So you can try excluding certain words to get more specific results. If you use exclude operator to remove specific words from the results, the picture will be completely different. Look at the example below with the exclusion of the word ideas.

The exclusion operator can be really helpful while researching for the specific content for your specific needs.

If you’re wondering if you can exclude multiple words, of course you can.

And you’ve been thinking whether there’s an include operator too, yes there is. The search query used in the screenshot below doesn’t just show the include operator but also being extremely specific with phrases in the quotes.

#5 Find Related websites

Now this one is really powerful- we’ve saved the best for the last. It’s possible to search for the related websites using the related: operator. You can find your competitors by searching related:yourdomain on google. Look at the picture below to see how it works.

Summary:

It’s amazing to see the power google search gives you to do the necessary research required to nail your SEO strategy. These operators are fantastic and free at the same time. So you can make use of them as required for your convenience.