You have definitely made thousands of searches online on Google and have been provided results from numerous websites accordingly, right?

But, have you ever known that you could make searches from within a specific website or blog excluding, by this, all possible results from other online sources?

That could happen sometimes that we’re interested in finding something within a specific website, isn’t it?

In this article, I’ll show you how to perform searches within a specific website on Google along with examples on how this works.

What is A Google Website Search

A google website search is a possibility made available by Google to help people search within a specific website on something they’re interested in. This way, Google will come up only with related information from that specific website.

This might be very interesting especially when you don’t know on which page or under which category, within a specific website, you can find what you’re searching for…

By doing this, you’re kind of asking Google to focus on getting you results only and uniquely from your specified website and not from the entire internet.

How to Perform a Google Website Search

Performing a Google website search is very easy. All you have to do is the following:

1 – Head over to Google search bar.

2 – Start with typing in “site:”

3 – Right after this you can type in your desired website url within which you’re interested in finding what you’re looking for…

4 – Then, type in your search term.

For example, if you’re searching for related results on “backlinks” on “Neilpatel.com” website, your Google search query will look like the following:

“site:neilpatel.com backlinks“.

As you can see below, all search results are coming uniquely from “NeilPatel.com” website exactly as we specified to Google in search query.

Also, all these results are about our already specified search term which is “backlinks“.

NB : Please make sure there will be no spaces between the colon sign and the website URL as this would alter your results.

What is that “site:” for?

This called a Google website operator and its goal is to tell Google to only show results from within the website url next to it.

Let’s suppose you’re looking for content from within the website “Backlinko.com“. All you have to do is typing in the Google search bar the following:

“site:backlinko.com”

You can also narrow down your search for something more specific like search search for content under a specific section under your desired website.

Let’s suppose you’re looking for the search term “Marketing” within the ‘hub” section of the website:

Your search query would look like the following:

site:backlinko.com/hub marketing

And as search results, you would get the following:

NB : Please make sure you use the right website url structure next to the command “site:” as search results might change because of this.

“site:https://domain.com” isn’t as “site:https://www.domain.com” and search results would be different.

This way, you make sure you get the right results.

Reasons for Using a Google Website Search Query

There are many reasons you might need to perform a Google website search. amongst these, we might list the following:

Looking for a Specific Piece of Information

Sometimes, you’re searching for a specific information on a specific website but you don’t know where it is exactly or under which section on the website.

Therefore, and without having to browse through the whole website, a Google website search would help go straight to the information you’re looking for.

Helping Analyze competition

Performing website queries can be very helpful when trying to search competition websites and analyze their strategies, products or services.

For example, a shoes retailer can perform a website query like “site:adidas.com” to analyze Adidas marketing strategies and products launches.

Likewise, if you own a blog, you can perform blog queries on your competition blogs to analyze their content, their monetization methods or affiliate marketing strategies.

Looking for Specific Keywords

Google search queries would be helpful also in searching for specific keywords on websites in your niche to help you analyze the pages optimized around those specific keywords so you can do similarly on your blog or website.

Let’s suppose you’re looking for “Meta tags” on Neilpatel.com website, you can type in the following:

site:neilpatel.com meta tags

To help identify pages around this specific keyword.

Identifying Indexed Pages on Your Website or Blog

Performing website queries on your own website or blog will help you also identify your indexed pages and any articles or pages you might need to update or delete from search results.

Fine-tuning your Search Results by Excluding Specific terms

sometimes and to help you refine your search much more by excluding related results to a specific term from your results, you can use a minus sign (-) to be placed before the term to be excluded…

Let’s suppose, you would want to search for “seo tips” within the website NeilPatel.com but you don’t want the results to include “linkbuilding tips“

Here is how your search query would look like:

“site:neilpatel.com seo tips -linkbuilding tips“

As you can see in the screenshot below, there is no page in search results related to the excluded term “linkbuilding“.

Fine-tuning your Search Results by Using OR Command

When you’re not sure of the exact wording to be used within a website, then the OR command can be very helpful so you’ll get possible results on any or both of them.

For example, you might be interested for “backlinks” on the Backlinko.com but unsure it is the exact wording used by the website as it might be also “link building“

So the way you’ll build your site query would be like this:

site:Backlinko.com “backlinks” OR “link building”

Your search results in Google will be contaning either “backlinks” OR “link building“.

Fine-tuning your Search Results by Using AND Command

Another way of fine-tuning your search results using Google website queries will be through using AND command for results that meet multiple criteria.

When you’re for example trying to get results for “Guest Posting” that also mention “Outreach” on NeilPatel.com website, you can build your site query as follows:

site:neilpatel.com”guestposting” AND “Outreach”.

That’s it for today GUYS!

I hope you so enjoyed this guide and also have learnt alot on how you can perform Google site queries. Please make sure to always be careful when building your site queries as the slightest mistake can impact the search results you can get on Google.

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