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Google’s “Related” Search Operator: Competitor Research and Link Building’s Best Kept Secret

When trying to find the competitors of clients or explore new link opportunities it can be tempting to start immediately hammering out a bunch of different query variations in Google. For example, if I was looking to guest post on a bathroom remodeling advice blog, I might start my search by mixing up keyword phrases by searching “Bathroom Renovation blog” or “Bathroom Restoration blog”. While this may lead us to some valuable insights, you still end up with a lot of extra noise that may not be relevant to what you’re looking for. Or worse, you could end up with a lot of missed opportunities by not using the right keywords. Today, I wanted to explain one of the easiest ways to uncover new competitors and find new link opportunities without being so reliant on keywords. You ready?

Introducing Google’s “Related:” Search Query

For as helpful and time-saving that this search operator is, I’m surprised that it gets almost no attention. This operator allows you to find pages that are related to the URL you type in the query based on Google’s understanding of the website’s content, not the keywords the site uses. To use this operator, this is what you type into the search box:

Related:URL

That’s it! And the results you get are incredibly powerful.

Finding New Competitors

OK, so now that we know the query, let’s explore how you can use it to quickly find competitors. Let’s say you’re a gym that offers MMA, boxing and other martial arts classes in a particular geographical location. I’ve used Pittsburgh since that’s where most of our clients are. The first thing you’d probably do is perform a search for “Pittsburgh MMA Gyms” and see what comes up:

1. MMA Gyms ORGANIC

 

You can see here we get a combination different results that may not be very relevant to our results. Paid ads take up room at the top while forum questions and Yelp reviews will take extra digging to find competitors or may not even help us at all. Now let’s take the number one result of “Fight Club Pittsburgh.com” and see what happens when we use our Related operator:

2. Related MMA

Andddddd voila! The SERP shows nothing but a clean list of sites that are similar to the URL you typed in! Now instead of worrying about the endless possibilities of keyword combinations that these sites have used, you only have to worry about changing the URL in the box and letting Google do all the heavy lifting for you.

Link Building Opportunities:

The Related search operator is also great for uncovering link opportunities. If you're interested in finding sites or pages that are similar to link opportunities you already know about, you can plug the known ones into the Related operator. Most recently, one of our clients was interested in getting some guest posts on renewable energy blogs. A simple search of “Renewable Energy Blogs” brings up these results:

3. Renewable Energy Blog Organic

Once again, look at these results. Not very helpful. By performing this search all we’ve done is bring up multiple pages on the same site and some book results that aren’t useful to us at all. Throw in some paid advertisements at the top and we have a bunch of noise that we need to filter through before we can locate anything useful. Not a very effective way of searching. However, the site “Renewable Energy World” does seem to be on the right track. Let’s take a look at site’s related to that one:

4. Renewable Energy Related

Once again, much better. We get a clean list of all the sites Google deems related to it. We can now take a little time to explore each one of these sites and see if they offer guest posting contributions. But which of these opportunities are more valuable than others. Let’s use the Mozbar to find out:

5. Renewable Energy Related Moz

Now we can use the SERP overlay to determine which links we should prioritize first and which we may want to use later. If you’re doing link building, you’re probably going to want to put that information into a spreadsheet. Fortunately, Evolving SEO has made a great tool that automatically does this for you in this article.

Hopefully this gives you guys some good insights on how you can use the Related operator to find competitors in your industry and find some new link opportunities. If you have any other creative ways you use this operator then feel free to comment below.

If you build backlinks, like to save time, and want software that makes insightful and useful recommendations – Linkio might be what you’ve been looking for.

Chris Vendilli
About the Author
Chris is the founder and CEO of Vendilli Digital Group. In his free time, you’ll find him camping, fishing, or playing beer league ice hockey with a bunch of guys who refuse to admit they’re already over the hill.
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