Is it legal to use SERP(s) to spy on your competitors?
Posted on : 17-06-2009 | By : Ali Abdullah | In : SEO
Tags: competition, Google, keyword research, ranking, search operators, SEO, SEO Spy, SERP
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs for short) gives more valuable data than you think and actually allows you to spy on any niche competition using simple research techniques “legally”. I’m sharing here some useful tricks to figure out how to use Google search operators to effectively do your research on competitors.
Although I’m sure that we’re all familiar with Google’s search operators when it comes to keyword research and optimization, some of you might already burned out all available tricks known to Google and even unknown ones! But I’m tapping these basic search operators again to demonstrate it from an SEO point of view and how extremely important is to narrow your search for optimum results and toward better decisions in your online business.
I can’t say phenomenal stuff are here but at least logical and effective, all 
worked for me since I started doing SEO the manual way. Usually I do this prior jumping for any results from a paid keyword tool.
Notes before getting started:
- The Bold text is what I wrote in Google search box.
- Approximate competition is indicated by the number of results returned in each search query and usually its on the top-right side of Google SERP. The text that read – “Results 1 - 10 of about 262,100″. however, most of the time the first top 100 pages are our concern.
- (Brackets) represent my comments, please let me know what you think, I love to brain storm with your feedback
Lets start with easy ones.
“small bird cage”
Results will show you pages that has the Exact Phrase in between the quotation marks this case SERP results will show webpages have small bird cage phrase only, without showing a single page with the word bird, small or the word cage separately or in any other combination. Thats mainly the effect of the quotation marks (known as the basic indicator of exact keyword competition)
“bird cage” -movie -pixar -film -novel -game
Results will show you pages that has the Exact Phrase mentioned but non of the words movie, pixar, film, novel, game. Obviously we are looking for pages that doesn’t talk about the movie bird cage or a video game if there is one. (this will narrow your results and hit better estimates on competitors)
site:ezinearticles.com car racing
Results are only from the site ezinearticles.com which have any combination of the two words car and racing. (Measure phrase density in webpages within a website! in this case you’re getting the famous articles directory pages which are talking about car racing. By the way checking these articles is a good idea to see where the authors are linking in their resource box, of course you can do this with more focus like omitting and Formula1 and Rally from results site:ezinearticles.com “car racing” -rally -f1)
link:wikipedia.org
Results shows pages thats links back to wikipedia.org domain (main page only) as each page has different link: results.
(SEO’ers easily figured that results page from link: query doesn’t show all actual links and not even all links found by Google bot!! so why this operator is there? The answer is quite simple, Google loves quality and instead of showing any link pointing to x it shows only ones that are pointing to x for quite some time which indicates that x is still delivering value to the latter. I guess other factors related to this but mainly the robot counts how many times it crawled the same link to say its valid and does qualify for Link: SERP, I’m not sure though. Keep in mind that if want to know whose linking to Your Own website then I recommend using Google webmasters tool to see exact figures and urls updated weekly. Back to competitors, this is useful to find what solid links they have. Eager to know more? Go to yahoo and search using the same operator link: but make sure to exclude the domain itself. you will love this.)
7…12 Megapixel sony camera
Any three dots separating two numbers means a query for RANGE, it will show results between the two numbers, in this case Cameras from 7 up to 12 Mega Pixels Sony will be listed in results, you will 8, 10 and even 7.8 Megapixels. Give it a try.
(lets say you target keywords for an e-commerce site selling a specific range of used LCD screens of 32 to 52 inch then you can find direct competitors selling the same range by trying 32…52 used LCD screens in your search box rather than looking at the big picture of searching used LCD screens only. The result differences are shocking! You can also fine tune more toward photo cameras and use 32…52 used LCD screens -Toshiba)
allintext:iphone 3g applications
or
intext:iphone intext:3g intext:applications
Results will show you pages that have all phrases mentioned in any combination in the page Text or URL but not in page title. In this example you will be sure that all results talks about iphone 3g applications. (I refuse to comment on this one now! Read more).
allintitle:iphone 3g applications
With a focus on the page title, results will show page titles with any combination of iphone 3g applications and whether these keywords mentioned or not in the page text.
(This is also another useful operator for general keyword research since this indicates how many pages indexed by google so far using these words in their title i.e. how many competitors competing on this keyword.
Now here is a trick, what if some of these pages are not competing on this phrase but it happen to have a combination of these words in their long tail page titles? Here is the use of allintext: operator as together with allintitle: they make a nice couple.
To dig more into this, compare allintitle: results with the allintext: results you got and watch the first 10 results. This will give a clear indication which pages are doing simple on-page optimization toward these words. The next step is to check the broad phrase search like a normal search for putting iphone 3g application in the search bar and hit search to see which pages in the previous comparison you made still showing? This indicates a nice off-page optimization they are doing to keep them ranking well. Now do your regular check on these page if you are interested.
inurl:LCD Screen
SERP will show pages stuffed with these two words in the urls only, any combination of LCD screen in urls. (this is another indicator for on-page optimization made by a webmaster toward these words).
~buy new tv set
Results will show pages with any combination of the words buy new TV set along with other pages targeting the synonymous of the word buy. You will find in your SERP other words like purchase, store, order etc… also these words highlighted in bold as a regular search keyword (useful to brain storm keywords and sub-keywords when you have stuff like ~Electric and you find Electronics, Electricity and even Energy, but searching brand names with this tool like ~Toshiba its going get you only Toshiba).
related:www.download.com
As per google, this shows similar sites to www.download.com, in terms of content according to site description and main keywords, try related:facebook.com
cache:www.download.com
The result is not a regular SERP here, it shows a snapshot of when the last time your page visited by Google bot. (When tracking changes or testing SEO techniques on your site this tool is a must to record results according to the last visit).
I would rather keep this post short, but its good to mention that other search tools also available for locals, weather, maps, stocks etc… and Google search tools here are really useful but nothing special for SEO as far as I know.
please note that results are rough estimates and based on what the index provides which is not in real time. However, I consider these results are just fine for research since more than 70% of the market is using the same “search index” of google (According to Compete report) to look for information.
