Who here uses Google pretty much every day?
How many of you rate yourselves as advanced users of Google?
No one? One person will be speaking to us.
According to IDC, knowledge workers spend 15%-30% of their day searching for information, yet more than half of their searches fail. Some of your failed searches will result in bad business deals or just bad decisions with significant opportunity costs. On the flip side, as a power searcher, you can uncover competitors’ business plans, Forrester Research reports that normally cost thousands and so much other market intel that it’ll make the NSA envious.
And you’re about to learn all of this from Google expert, Stephan Spencer.
The Art of SEO by Stephan Spencer, Eric Enge and Jessie Stricchiola
Stephan has optimized the websites of some of the biggest brands in the world, including Chanel, Volvo, Sony, and Zappos. Stephan is also a best-selling author of three books all published by O’Reilly. The Art of SEO, which is a giant book, you could literally kill somebody with, Social Ecommerce, and Google Power Search. He founded the SEO agency, NetConcepts, acquired in 2010, and is now part of the multi-billion dollar ad agency conglomerate, Dentsu Aegis. Stephan consults, speaks and writes on SEO. He also hosts two popular podcasts, Get Yourself Optimized and Marketing Speak.
Give it up for Stephan Spencer.
Who wants to become an expert Google searcher in the next 10 minutes? Awesome. As you heard, up to 30% of us as information workers are spending our time searching, and yet, half of our searches fail, so that’s a problem.
Because if we’re going to spend so much time searching for information and a bunch of the time it’s garbage, it’s clutter. Add all that time up over your lifetime. Let’s start with the first tool or tip which is to take secret information and make it not so secret. Here’s a search result for a confidential business plan in quotes.
A business plan is a phrase minus template to remove all of the templates. I don’t want any business plan templates. I want real confidential business plans. File type: PDF. So I just want PDF documents because those are probably actual real business plans, not regular web pages. Here’s an actual example found at the top of the results for that query.
And look how substantial that is. That’s 20 pages, it keeps scrolling. But that’s a legit PDF document. And it is highly confidential. If you read it, it’s written all over the place that this is not to be disseminated. Yet it’s in Google. How about analyst reports? They get paid lots of money. Gartner Group, Forrester Research, Boston Consulting Group, etc., but they’re free.
According to IDC, knowledge workers spend 15%-30% of their day searching for information, yet more than half of their searches fail.
Look at this one. So I wanted one on customer experience, also known as CX. So I put CX and then Forrester Research in quotes. Opinions reflect judgment at the time is a bit of the disclaimer that I grabbed from one of their research reports. Put that in quotes and then file type: pdf because all of their documents are PDFs.
Boom. Legit, real Forrester research. Not the kind that is paid for by big corporate sponsors that they make for free on their websites. No, this one is meant to be on the DL. How about acquiring social proof? That’s another great thing you can use Google for. Let’s see how that works.
Here is a client of mine, WhatIsMyIPAddress.com, who before we worked together did not have an as-seen-on logo on their website. Bar like that on their homepage, look at that. The Washington Post, USA Today, and some great mainstream media mentions. And he had no clue until he did some Google searches. And then of course he put those onto his press page.
Which he also didn’t have until we started working together. So that legitimizes your brand presence. And you come pre-selected, that’s the whole point of social proof.
Let’s figure out how to do that ourselves, just using some simple Google News searches. So we’re going to go to a specialized search engine, Google News, and we’re going to use the phrase matching capability, putting phrases into quotes.
Gender Intelligence by Barbara Annis
And we’re going to use Barbara Annis’ Gender Intelligence. It’s a shame she’s not here, but hopefully, she’ll watch the talk afterward. So you’ll see a lot of noise here. Gender intelligence returns a bunch of irrelevant results about AI. What if I put quotes around it? Boom! Everything is now relevant.
This is really good stuff that should go on her press page, but she doesn’t have one. So she should have one and put all the stuff on there. Look at these legit mentions. Entrepreneur and The Globe and Mail, great stuff, right? How about when you don’t have attribution, and you should get attribution? Again, we’ll use Barbara as an example.
Put gender intelligence in quotes. I wanted to look at confidential documents, file type, and PDF and see if she’s not being mentioned in some of these documents. So I minused out Barbara Annis, and lo and behold, definitely some really legit documents that are confidential, haha. That mentions gender intelligence or even about gender intelligence but doesn’t even mention her name.
So she could go and reach out and say, hey, you’re citing some of my research, some of my stats, etc. I do want some attribution credit. Thieves are stealing your IP and you don’t even know it. So here’s an example. The Art of SEO. So that is my biggest book. As you can see here, it’s a thousand pages, almost.
And it’s for free! So if you want to find it for free, just type in this query. Actually, don’t do that, just buy the book. No, go get it for free, it’s in the back. The Art of SEO, in quotes, third edition, also in quotes, and then filetype: PDF, right there in the first half of the page, is the first edition, or the second edition, yes, those are on there too, but the third edition, for free, in its entirety, 984 pages, the whole damn book.
RND equals rip-off and duplicate, but let’s do it in a way that’s more kind of legit and nice. Let’s use it as inspiration again put yourselves in the perspective of Barbara Annis And you’re trying to do some brainstorming for viral articles, viral blog posts that will hopefully get links, and shares, and likes, and retweets, all that.
So you put in the site:Buzzfeed.com, because who does viral content better than BuzzFeed, right? They’re valued at over a billion dollars for good reason: They’re incredibly good at it.
And then put in the additional keywords of women and men. So now you’ve got great ideas. You’re not going to rip off and duplicate the headlines, but use these as inspiration for your viral articles.
Here are 12 things men never have to think about that women do. For example, walking in a dark parking structure. It’s not something you might have to think about if you’re a man, but you definitely are thinking about it as a woman. Women are sharing things men don’t know about women. There’s some good stuff in here that has a curiosity gap.
Let’s learn how to do reverse image search now. Has anyone done a reverse image search? Three of you.
Do you even know what it is? Now you will. You guys are going to become ninjas by the end of this talk at doing searches. See that little icon on Google Images? These are images from Google.com. You click on that little icon there for the image and watch, what we’re going to do here is we’re going to take this infographic, which is awesome, it’s all about your poop.
And so, how well do you know your Beep? This is the title of this infographic. So, instead of searching for the title of this infographic, let’s pretend that we made the infographic, and it went viral. We want to find all the places that republished this awesome infographic, so we’re going to turn to Google Images and do a reverse image search.
Watch how we do that. So first off, gonna click on that little icon of the camera. Then we’re going to paste in the image URL, and now it’s going to find that. We click on the small version of the image, and here we have hundreds of places on the web where that image is being published, where we could reach out to them if they haven’t already attributed us as the author of that image, and get a link and a mention.
Search for the fresh stuff. So if you’re, again, doing a search for gender intelligence, And you just click on that little tools see that on the top right there, click on tools, anyone ever click on that? You’re missing out. Click on that, and it shows any time there, and then from that list, choose past year.
For example, you could choose past hours if you want something really fresh. And now, the gender intelligence search results, are really recent, new, cool stuff. Things like articles in the Ladders, and here, Genius Network.
And here’s now real-time flight data, if you’re wondering if you should head to the airport to pick up your spouse or whatever, Google for their flight number. UA354 or 364, boom. You get real-time flight data and arrival times and all that. Here, my last tip is don’t Google it, but Soovle it. What the heck is Soovle? Has anyone ever heard of Soovle?
Nobody, right? So here it is. It’s a very handy little free tool, you start typing. Do you know how you get autocomplete suggestions as you type from Google? What if you also got this simultaneously from YouTube, Answers.com, Wikipedia, Bing, and Amazon, all simultaneously. Here’s how that works, you just start typing.
And it starts populating, and these are all clickable. If I clicked on SEO books under Amazon, for example, I’d get right to the search results on Amazon for SEO books. And hopefully, my book would show up number one. So my gift to you is a free copy, digital copy, and I do have a bunch that I brought that are back there.
I don’t know if I have quite enough. I don’t think I have quite enough. Exactly 60-ish. But everybody’s gonna get a digital copy if you just text 33444 with the keyword Googled with a D, Googled. And then just follow instructions. It’ll email you the free digital book. And then for those of you who want the printed book, there’s plenty of them.
And there are a few of the Art of SEO out there back there too.
