If you’re like me, the most advanced you’ve ever gotten with Google search is to keep it specific by enclosing your search term in inverted commas.  So you might be surprised to know that besides the very basic operation of telling Google what to search for,  Google has some very cool advanced search features.  Once you get the hang of these, they can be used for executing some pretty serious niche marketing research.

By fine tuning your search query, Google will reveal a whole bunch of information regarding keyword competition, indexed pages on competitors sites and much more.  So roll up your sleeves and let’s get familiar with using Google’s advanced operators.  Once you mastered them,  you’ve got a very efficient and best of all, completely free niche marketing tool.  So let’s take a look …

The first thing you need to know before we start is that all operators end in a colon but don’t include a space between the operator and the query following it.  It can make the search tempremental.  Ok, so let’s take a look at some of the most important operators for the purpose of niche marketing research.

So you have an idea for a profitable niche and you want to look into it further. We’re assuming that you’re not using Jim Morris’ Nichebot, so you head straight off to Goolgle and type in your keyphrase, let’s say, credit repair help. This is a big highly competitive niche and Google returns 777,000 results.

With this basic search query,  Google has given us every website containing the words, credit, repair and help. Not very useful at all!  However, if you use  Google’s intitle: operator,  these results can be filtered to show how many website contain these specific keywords in the their title.

Most web sites insert a carefully chosen title in each of their pages, usually one that will please the search engines. So, being able to search site titles matching your keyword is a very powerful piece of kit.

So intitle:credit repair help returns 288,000 results. A little better than 777,000 but still nothing to get excited about!

If we now restrict our search futher by containing our keyphrase in inverted commas like so,

intitle:”credit repair help”

we are now down to 3,520 results. We now know that 3520 websites have the exact match for our term credit repair help in their title. So, credit repair help is a pretty competitive term.

Certain keyphrases can also be restricted from the title search by using the ‘-’ sign. For example,

intitle:”credit repair help” -intitle:bad

This query will return titles with credit repair help but restrict titles that also contain the word ‘bad’.

Taking it a step further, using the inurl: operation will show how tight the competition is for our keyphrase in the url, rather than the title of competiting websites.

inurl:”credit repair help” shows 1,910 search results.

You can also specify a word to include or exclude in the search with the  inurl: operator.

The word can be anywhere in the URL, and not just in the domain name. By adding the ‘-’ sign, we can exclude sites we don’t want to see results from.  For example, the following query finds pages that contain “credit repair help” in the URL,  but excludes listings from www.ezinearticles.com.

inurl:credit repair help -site:ezinearticles.com

So by using just a couple of Google’s advanced operators, we have managed to find the number of competitors with an exact match to our search term within our niche market.

Specify Multiple Words in URL with allinurl: to examine competitors keyword use

The allinurl: operator is similar  to inurl: except that it can be followed by many words. This query will restrict search results to pages that contain all of the query words in the url. For example, the following query will return pages from debtsteps.com that have either “credit” and “repair” or “help” and “advice” in the URL.

allinurl:debtsteps.com credit | repair | help | advice

Use the intext; operator to find Specific Words in Site Text

Let’s say we want to search google for a specific term. For example, if we have a niche credit repair help product, we might want to search specifically for people looking for help with credit repair.

By using the intext: operator we can do this pretty well while eliminating sites that have this keyphrase in their url, title or metatags. This means were are likely to dig up real people looking for real help and not just competitors taking advantage of the keyphrase for search engines.

intext:”I need help with credit repair”

Now that we’ve checked out the number of competitors in our niche and researched some ‘in text’ keywords, we can gather more intelligence on our leading competitors by using the link: operator.

link:www.aaacreditguide.com will return all the pages that link to aaacreditguide.com.  Examining the page rank of those links can reveal useful intelligence on where to place links for our own niche site.

But we don’t want to link on just any old page, even if the pagerank is good. We want to link on pages being visited regularly by Google. To find these we use cache: operator.

cache:www.aaacreditguide.com will show how recently aaacreditguide.com had been visited by google. Use this operator for any page that you are considering linking from.

Finally, let’s wrap up with two more useful search operations, related: and define:

define: affiliate marketing returns a whole list of definitions for affiliate marketing. Not really so useful for niche marketing, but one I like.

And finally related: is a great operator for digging out competing sites.  Typing related:www.ezinearticles.com into Google, for example,  will throw back a whole list of similar sites.

So there you have it.  You can now happily use google to dig up keyword and linking intelligence on any competitor within your chosen niche.