Free Google search tools, filters and settings which any SEO can use in their daily work

Did you know that there are a free set of tools and filters right in the google search page which can prove extremely useful in your SEO work?

Used correctly these tools and filters can be used to:

-         spy on competitors

-         check your rankings

-         identify some horribly tricky SEO issues

-         and plenty more

Let’s have a look at these tools and filters in action.

Check that your site is indexed

The first thing you can do is check that your site is listed in Google’s index. To do this, enter the command: Site:yourwebsite

For example, by entering the following:

Site:bbc.com

you will get this result:

Since the BBC site shows up, it’s clear that it is indexed. That might not be a big surprise, but this also applies to pages.

If a newly published page on your site doesn’t show up, then it won’t have been indexed yet, so you can take some steps to remedy that (build links to it, include in site map, or submit via Google Search Console).

Refining the Search with tools, settings and filters

To refine this search, there some helpful tools at your disposal – located on the right. Let’s have a look at them.

Once clicking on the TOOLS, you will get this:

The default is: All time, All results – this will simply show all indexed results for the website.

Or you can choose to use the so-called: Verbatim filter – which means it contains the exact word, or string of words. I find it useful if to find specific articles.

For this I will search for my older article titled: Can you rank a website using only nofollow links?

If I search that with all time, all results, I get lots of different results that are talking about this subject.

But if I search by the exact string (verbatim), I will find my result immediately: 

This function really narrows down the results if you know what exactly you are searching for. And of course, if you don’t find your result, then it shows that your article hasn’t been indexed yet, or it has been de-indexed, and you might even have a Google penalty.

But it starts to get really interesting when you start to play with the time filter:

You can use this in two different ways:

1.)   Either checking a website for updates, let’s say you want to check what was published on BBC in last 24 hours or 1 week. Or to check if the content you have published was already picked up, crawled and indexed.

2.)   If you want to find what was published recently on a certain topic, let say coronavirus news around the world in the past hour: 

And now to SETTINGS:

There are so many settings you can play around with…. and I won’t bore you with a detailed manual here. However, I would like to give you some tips on how I like to use those settings when making a local search when checking on my competitors or checking my rankings across different markets.

These settings can be used in combination with an IP address change and using the local Google version like .de, .at, .it and so on.

To refine your search and make it as local as possible add the following steps:

In search settings, select the desired region:

This will make your search much more accurate from a local perspective. Here you can see the performance of your site in a certain country, as well as finding local competitors.

In niches where you want to target multiple specific countries, this can be very useful. It’s also cheap, when compared to paid tools like SEMRush or SurferSEO.

I hope that these tips help you with narrowing down some SEO issues you might be facing, or just to compare your metrics with competitors in regions you are targeting.