Are you bored with the results that Google or Bing are returning for your searches? The same websites over and over again?
It’s no wonder. After the recent updates, domain crowding within Google’s results has hit the all-time high, bordering on ridiculous for some search queries.
Regardless of whether you’re just a savvy web user or a professional SEO, the following 4 tricks will hopefully put a smile back on your face and make you feel excited.
Well, just the way you felt in 1990s when you stumbled upon that ultra-cool website that you’ve never ever heard before of. So, let’s begin.
There are websites out there whose only purpose is to snoop for relationship signals between various websites. That way, if you know of a great pet training website but want to discover more, the aggregators will show you other related websites. The algorithms are very different and the results too are very different. In many cases the aggregators are inaccurate but you are guaranteed to find exciting stuff there.
The ones that I’ve used are:
similarsitesearch.com
moreofit.com
m.siteslike.com/similar/
Do you know of any others? Please add your comments below.
Feedreader is, well, exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a feed reader and it’s one of the best out there. If you’re fed up with Google Reader for some reason, give Feedreader a go. As an added bonus it is offering a search tool that provides results based on its own RSS crawler.
It is pretty accurate and due to the very nature of feeds, it delivers timely results. And if you don’t discover a fresh blog or two, you’re permitted to post a venomous comment below.
A tip for SEOs: If you’re researching blogs who have just covered a particular story (you have read about Derek Halpern’s Drafting technique, haven’t you?) and you’re not happy with the domain-crowed results that Google’s time-restricted search gives, try Feedreader and you’ll be surprised.
Semrush (a) is a great SEO tool. It gives you a wealth of data on website rankings, keyword search volume, paid ads etc. I’ve been using it ever since its Beta release for competitor research, keyword research and inspiration for PPC. More recently I discovered that it can also provide an invaluable insight into the lesser known parts of the WWW.
What you want to do is pick a relatively popular website within your niche. Enter its domain into Semrush search box, locate the organic keywords summary as shown in the picture and click on the large number (i.e. total number of organic keywords).
This will produce the full list of keywords this site is ranking for.
Now, you want to find the most obscure long-tail keywords that nobody is knowingly targeting.
For that, click on the tiny arrow at the top of “Volume” header and you will have the least popular keywords at the top of the list.
Now explore them one by one. Click on the keyword and scroll down. You will be given a list of 20 websites that are competing for this keyword.
I almost guarantee that you will not have heard about at least 2 or 3 websites on that list.
This is one of the best advanced search operators that Google has. You simply type
Related:bluepetwidgets.com
in the Google’s search box and the journey begins. Google is really unpredictable about the way it serves related results. Sometimes they are, well, how do I put it in a polite way…? But in most cases you will find dozen of smaller and more obscure sites. There is so much cool stuff going on outside the mainstream web giants!
These methods can be used by advanced web users to search beyond the realms of Google. But mainly, I guess, this is aimed at SEOs. Writers get their writer block while SEOs occasionally get outreach block. What do you do when you’ve been in touch with all bloggers from your niche? Grab these tips and go find yourself some fresh ones. The web is huge and there are always new sites popping up!
