39 Essential Google Search Operators Every SEO Ought to Know

In SEO, it’s often the little things that matter.

After you’ve learned the basics, you can’t stop. You need to push yourself and learn more and more.

You might not learn anything that will revolutionize how you look at SEO, but I guarantee that you will learn how to become a better SEO.

One of the best things you can learn to do is to save time without sacrificing quality.

If you do SEO, you know how many long processes are involved.

And you know how awesome it is when you can save time.

I’m a big fan of “hacks” that actually help you cut down on the amount of time you spend doing these tedious processes.

I’m not talking about gimmicky hacks. I’m talking about tricks you can use to get the most out of your work time.

One of my favorites? Using advanced search operators.

Why are these so important? In one word: Google.

Every SEO should know Google like the back of their hand. It’s by far the most important search engine to focus on, and it’s how many of your future customers will find you.

I’ve met a lot of SEOs who could recite Google’s last 10 algorithm updates, but they can’t actually use Google all that well. Imagine that!

By using search operators, you can slash the time you spend on Google and get better results. And the best part: It’s not difficult at all.

Even if you’re not doing a lot of SEO, you owe it to yourself to learn these so you can use them in your day-to-day work.

What are search operators?

Google officially defines search operators as “symbols or words in your search to make your search results more precise.”

Search operators have their basis in coding. They’re basically shortcuts to getting better results.

When you use a search operator, you’re telling Google to narrow down the results in a specific way.

So instead of getting pages and pages of unrelated results, you get only results that are relevant to what you’re searching for.

Of course, you have to use them the right way. And there are tons of them.

The best way to learn is to see how to use them, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

1. Get every result

There are some times when you want to get every result possible.

If you do, just search normally:

2. Find exact matches

Let’s say you’re looking up infographics that discuss video marketing.

You might use the search query “video marketing infographic.” If you Google that, notice what pops up:

You can immediately tell that some of these results aren’t what you want.

The result at position 3 doesn’t even have the phrase “video marketing” in it! But it does have the words “video” and “marketing.”

If you’re not specific, Google might not take your search query literally.

To remedy this, you can use quotation marks. If you put quotation marks around a word or phrase, you’ll tell Google to only return results that exactly match the word or phrase.

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