Google Search Tips #6 - Related Search
Jenny Marsden • November 29, 2018
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Search For Related Content With Google
I'm not sure if you all use a Feed Reader. I do and I use Feedly. I love it because it puts all my content in one place, I can categorise it, sort it, save articles and reread whenever I like. Even with such a great tool I find I sometimes get Millennial level boredom with the blogs I'm following. That's not their fault - I followed them for a reason but sometimes if I have time on my hands (holidays typically) I want new content and I want it NOW! Step forward Google Related Search!!
How To Search For Related Content
This is in my opinion, one of googles best search features so let me explain how it works. Lets say you have a fave website or blog you follow but you would like to find more similar blogs. Open your browser (Chrome is my browser of choice) and type in related:thewebsiteyoulike.com . To be clear you are typing the word "related" with a semi colon : then adding in (no spaces) the website you want to find related results for.
For Example:
Lets say I love Tumblr and I want to find more websites like Tumblr. I would type "related:tumblr.com" (without the quotes) into my browser and it will look for websites that have similar content to Tumblr and show you a list.
NB: If you use Chrome you can type this directly into the URL bar however if you are using another browser and don't have google as your default search engine, you will have to open Google first and then type this into the Google search field.
My Results
My results for my Tumblr related search are showing in the image below. You can see that Google has recognised that Tumblr is an image driven website so has recommended StumbleUpon (a little like Tumblr but something you randomly generate), Behance which is Adobe's portfolio website (also image based) and Flickr.
I will note however that the more specific your search
website is, the more varied the results. If I type in a small local web company for example, I will often get no results. I am assuming that there are key points that must be met for google to find and compare websites to each other. So if you do not have many blog posts OR your blog posts are wide and varied in content theme and style, you may not get too many results. Don't be discouraged by this if you are searching for competitors to your own website. If you are developing content for your market that is what your clients want to see, if it does cover a wide range of subjects that's good for your client base so stressing about not getting any comparative results using this search is probably a waste of your valuable time. To show you what I mean by this you can see the search results below in order:
- related:tumblr.com - a wide variety of image based and browsing websites is returned
- related:neilpatel.com (one of the industry's foremost expert on SEO and marketing) - only one comparitive website was returned. The others are Neil Patel on other platforms.
- related:theplanetD.com (a travel blog I follow) - and heaps of alternatives show up.
So I hope this has helped you narrow down more cat video websites or enabled you to find you competitors more easily.
My search results for Tumblr and The Planet D below
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About Jenny
I started my IT career in Database Administration and .Net coding. While I LOVED that work, I realised very quickly that I also wanted a life. To be a top end coder or DB Admin, you have to comit your downtime to constantly learning and evolving and while that is also something I love, I wanted it to be my work and not my life. So I morphed my love of design with my knowledge of all things SEO and moved into building small business websites.
Why small business websites? I'm a small business myself and I know how hard it can be so I wanted to give my clients a great service, with an approachable point of contact where no question was a "stupid question".
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