Episode 26 – The site: Search Operator
We share five different ways you can use the site: search operator to help your SEO efforts!
Total Number of Indexed Pages
This number isn’t perfect and can vary from the more accurate coverage report in search console, but is completely actionable
Find Indexed Low-Quality Pages
Find low quality pages like tag/category archives, date archives, author archives, image attachments, theme templates, duplicate pages, pages that should be hidden, pdfs, etc
Find Competing Content
Add a query to the site search to see all content that covers the related topic. See if you have content that could be competing for the same terms.
Find Title / Meta Description issues
Use this search to quickly scan your page titles and meta descriptions to see if you have missing, improperly optimized titles/descriptions, or titles that contain the same target term (typically an SEO plugin or platform title setting)
Use it on your competitors
Find content ideas, learn from their mistakes, and see what topics they’re covering and how.
Bonus: Technical Issues
Old subdomains, SSL / prefix issues
More reading / links mentioned:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-search-operators/