Gaga for Google Custom Search Engines Part 3 - REPLAY

Hello everybody and welcome to Shally's Alley. This is Shally. If you don't believe me, then I've got my shirt to prove it. See there, I got my name. I wear this when I go out so in case I get lost, people know, you know, where to, where to send me home. Anyway, just kidding. So thanks for joining us today. The topic is episode 3 of the very popular Google Custom Search Engines series. What we'll be talking about today is how to add synonyms to your custom search engine. And no, I don't mean cinnamon as in the spice that you put in your coffee. I mean alternative keywords. This is perhaps probably the second most powerful feature of a custom search engine, particularly when you use a custom search engine that searches the entire web. When you have a CSE that searches only a particular website, it's much more narrow and targeted, and in that case, you can use just basic keywords. Once you start adding a number of different websites and you have multiple websites, then labels start coming in handy because you can then tag together multiple websites to search, like all of your competitors or all of your conferences. But no matter what, synonyms always apply. What's really important about synonyms with Google Custom Search engines is that you can essentially define your own dictionary. That's right, you can define your own dictionary. So instead of having to type all these nested logical disjunctions with a bunch of ORs and parentheses, all of that can be summarized with one word. And it doesn't even have to be a real word. It can be something you've completely made up that invokes all of the other words. In other words, what I'm trying to tell you is that you can basically build any list of words and stitch them together. Expressions, jargon, euphemisms, buzzwords, catchwords, you essentially build your own terminology. So what can you use this powerful feature for? Well, I can think of 4 really important things. Number 1, job titles. Not all companies have the same job titles, so you can have a job title that searches all of the other job titles that are defined by that job title. You can also stitch together names of companies. For example, your tier 1 competitors or all the companies in this particular industry segment. You can also stitch together skills, functions, names of tools, applications, software, software names, technologies, methodologies. I can also think of another one, which is degrees and certifications and the names of schools. Last episode, I mentioned something about synonyms that in my experience working for companies like Google and Microsoft, doing a lot of recruiting for technology people with computer science degrees, I learned that there are, at least in my experience, 13 different ways that people express that they have a degree in a computer science related field. Of course, BSCS or bachelor's in computer science is the most common, but there's a bunch of others. Well, that right there to me is a really good use of a synonym where you put in BSCS and then define it with all the other abbreviations. But you can also do corporate abbreviations, internal jargon. How about geography? City names, postcodes, area codes, names of towns or counties, names of schools or universities. First step in identifying synonyms to use is going to be understanding the keywords that your target audience uses because that's what you're going to be using to search. So that's a topic for another course. We have an entire module on identifying keywords, but there's a couple of really easy ways to do it. One of them, of course, is the ever-present LinkedIn. If you find a candidate that you are interested in, look down at their skills and you'll see a list of skills that are essentially keywords. And one of those may probably identify the types of keywords that you want to use, and we can start from there. Next is how do we build that list? Well, before I jump into that and get a little too technical with you right now, I want to start with just showing you where all of this is. You're going to go into your custom search engine. We'll jump back into our previously utilized search engine that we were building, and I'll show you where it is. Okay, it's a lot easier said than done. There we go. Okay, we're going to google.com/cse and we entered our search engine that we started working on last time, or the time before that actually. There we go. Shelly's basic LinkedIn demo search, and there we go. All right, as you might recall, the list is over here. When you drop this down, you'll see all of yours. Yes, I know I have a problem. I actually have an index of all these because it's quite a bit. And where we were, we had just started to add some sites here. And we started to add some refinements. So those all are search features we have inside of the search features over here on the left-hand side, the refinements and the synonyms. Refinements we talked about already, synonyms is the topic for today. Now last time I used two examples, one for the names of cities, other names for Atlanta for people that might live here, they might recognize Roswell, Peachtree Corners, Peachtree City. I just kind I kind of threw up a couple of here at random. So this is one utilization, and the other one is to invent a term that is only used by you. In this case, I used tax companies and I put the names of the big tax firms in here. You don't have to use Boolean in synonyms. Simply a comma suffices to tell Google that you want to separate one word from another. So if we were to add another synonym here, let's say for example, Um, we talked about a couple of things that we can use synonyms for— job titles, for example. Let's start with that. We just click Add, and let's say that we want, um, software engineers. So I'm going to do SDE for software development engineer. This is my keyword that I'm going to type in, and then all of the variations go here. So this would be software engineer see software developer, web developer, mobile developer, and so on. You will eventually run out of space, so you're gonna might— you're gonna want to create different synonyms. So you might have this SDE1 and an SDE2 and so on. We'll call this SDE1. Might as well add SDE and SDE2. The E-T for software development engineer in test. Okay. So we'll put SDE into our search engine here and test and see what happens. You can see it's already starting to find software engineer, software engineer. That's probably going to be the biggest set of results because it's probably the most common. But it's pulling up nothing but Software Engineers. So we see that it worked. Then you can create SDE2, and this one could be for, let's see, um, Programmer or Web Designer. I know that's not a Software Engineer, but just want to show you the difference here. Programmer, Web Designer, Application engineer, etc., and hit OK. And you'll notice the difference between SDE1 on LinkedIn profiles here versus SDE2, also on LinkedIn profiles. Those first few are ads. So there's programmer, right, instead of software engineer. Very powerful when you use it in a planful way like this and you have multiple combinations. Personally, I find it better to create made-up words because what I've noticed is that when you have a word that is a naturally occurring word, that word itself is also thrown in in the search, and it may not be something you want to find because it may be a word that is too common. Like Atlanta, probably not a good example, but what if you had Rochester? Well, there's 27 different Rochesters in the United States, and maybe you want to specify a particular one. So you might want to create, um, Region 1 or something like that just so that you have kind control over what are the keywords that it expands. However, if that doesn't matter, for example, in the world of job titles, you might have SDE actually included because, well, that's an actual job title. Let's see what else. Related company names, we've already done that. Jargon, skill or function. Here's where we might start using something like, for example, LinkedIn. So we could go to our LinkedIn account, and perhaps do a search for people that are in, hmm, let's see, let's find talent acquisition managers. We'll do a quick search for talent acquisition manager, just a basic search here. I'm typing, but it's not coming up on the screen. Give it a second here. Okey-dokey. Well, if this doesn't work, we might have to go to my favorite, favorite tool. Okay, yep, it's crashing. Well, you can do it on LinkedIn, just look up a profile, like I said, and then go to the bottom and you'll see skills. Or you can use my favorite tool of all time, which is SeekOut. Big shout out to the SeekOut peeps. With SeekOut, you actually get a very cool tool that's called Insights that allows you to actually pull out the keywords that are in a particular profile or set of profiles. So I'll use my example here, tax manager, or actually, um, talent acquisition manager, and hit enter. 28,000 candidates, that's a lot. I probably should have narrowed it down a little bit more, but I wanna show you insights. Again, you can do this with LinkedIn, but here it's all sort of in one place. It's giving me intel on the location, companies, titles. This could be useful, but down here you also see an area called skills. So of course we have human resources, interviews, applicant tracking, onboarding. These are all keywords or jargon that you could use in your, synonym engine for a particular set of skills or functions. So we'll call this TA manager, and then we'll say here the phrases would be talent acquisition manager, talent acquisition lead. Let's see what else we can do. Interviewing, onboarding, applicant tracking, and so on. So there's an example of functional-related keywords. Bring it over to our test here. I'm going to click on the LinkedIn tab and see we have talent acquisition manager, operations, interviewing, etc. By the way, you can combine multiple keywords together in synonyms. So TA manager and Atlanta, for example, that would be Atlanta TA manager, and you would get results that combine an extension of both. Looks like it skipped. Nope, it did pull Atlanta. Okay, all right, moving right along. What else can we do here? Well, there are degrees, as I mentioned before, or universities. If you want to do a search for, for example, diversity purposes, you can use a list of HBCUs, the names of, um, you know, up to maybe 7 or so HBCUs per term, and there's a few more than that, so you might add H— helps if you type it in the window, right? HBCU1, and then in here add the first batch, uh, and so on. Or you can also use the names of degrees, for example, as keywords. So that would give you, um, the search that I wanted to show you is the diversity search for people with disabilities. So this could be, let's see, the diversity, let's call it diversity 1 or diversity, yep, there we go. And then here we could use the names of the schools, for example, Blaudit, NTID, and so on. I, we covered this in a previous module, so go back and look at that. There's also a handout if in the files section. By the way, if you're wondering where that file section is, let me help you with that. You can get those from the Facebook group that you find right there. Okay, so here I'm putting in the names of several schools for the hearing impaired. You could use diversity 2 would be for visually impaired and so on. Okay, so that's how you use synonyms. This will all be in the notes, but as you can see here, we have a bunch of different examples for how to do it. One we did not talk about are area codes and postal codes. If you're going to use postal codes or zip codes, make sure that you're doing that for lead generation, because a lot of resumes these days just don't have postal codes. You might find some, but by and large, people just have their email address on their resumes and then maybe the name of the city. But for area codes, it works really well. Here in Atlanta, we have quite a few area codes. I think it might be up to like 11 or so—770 and 678 and 404. So one thing I could add to my Atlanta search would be the area codes, or I could just say, for example, uh, Atlanta codes, and add 770, 404, 678. I can't even remember all the other ones. Hit OK, and then when I use that in my search, I'll find those phone numbers, hopefully. Um, one of the dangers with— not dangers, but one of the risks of area codes is that the number 770 may not be at the beginning of the number. So one of the things you might want to do to make sure that it's happening is to add the, um, fourth— the second part of it, or you actually use the name of the state. Or you would do Atlanta and then maybe something like GA to make sure that you're getting— I can't guarantee you, but at least you're more than likely going to be getting more 770s in the phone number as opposed to like an address or something like that. See, here's 404, 678, etc. So that'll help you a little bit with that if you're going to use area codes. So in the last little bit here, let's talk about where we can find synonyms. Now I mentioned SeekOut or LinkedIn. But you should also pretend to be a candidate. And as a candidate, as a job seeker, you can go to a couple of different places. I would pretty much just start with Google. And let's say that you are looking for candidates that are, um, civil engineers. We would put in civil engineer jobs, and Google will come back to their by putting in the word jobs, come back to their job search engine here, which will allow you to go directly to the job search engine. And you can then glance through a few of these, um, civil engineering jobs. Look for the ones that are a little bit more closely related to what you do, as opposed to, you know, do you want structural engineer or roadway engineer? So here's a roadway engineer. Then I would go through this and look at what are the skills that are listed here as requirements. PE or EIT for professional engineer, CAD with InRoads or GeoPack or OpenRoads. Great, I'm building a synonym right off of there. So job searches is a good place for that, but there's more. Aside from jobs, you can also use Indeed or any of the other job search engines, by the way, but But eventually you're going to be limited by the terms that are being inserted into job descriptions by the employers. So you're gonna wanna go a little bit further because candidates don't always put the same keywords in their profiles that employers do in their job descriptions. So where else can you go? Well, my all-time favorite has got to be the OneLook reverse dictionary. And if you just go to onelook.com, you can start typing here, but at the bottom, you see this reverse dictionary. What this does is it allows you to put a couple of concepts together, related words together, and it will then come back and give you suggestions on similar, uh, or words that might potentially mean the same thing. They don't have to be synonyms, they could also be completely different words but that are related. So here you can put a simple phrase like civil engineer, or you can put together more concepts by just adding a comma. Again, you don't need Boolean here. So let's do roads, bridges, um, let's see, tunnels, and so on. And it'll come back and give you suggestions, names of some companies. Uh, here's a job title, highway engineer. I didn't even think of that one. Notice that there's some tabs. When you click on All, you see 100 keywords that are kind of all over the place, but you can specifically say, show me only nouns. Or when I do phrase searches, I like action phrases, so I look for verbs. Verbs are very good phrase searches, but you can have both of these. You can also filter them. By show me letters that, you know, start with or end with or whatever. And you can alphabetize them as opposed to ranking them based on, um, relevance. So when you're doing it by relevance, there's— it's a random alphabetic order. Now another thing is if you click on any one of these like David Bernhardt Steinman, you'll see that it doesn't actually take you to a definition. What it does is it brings up a window that gives you options for many other tools. One of them is definitions. There's also related, so you can use the related tool and find— do a search essentially on just that phrase. Or you could use the definitions tool, and this will take you to a place that points you to a number of dictionaries. OneLook itself is a vertically integrated search engine. It doesn't have an index itself. What it does, it points you to a bunch of other places. That's fine, but it's very helpful when you have concepts that are not necessarily synonymous but that are related. So that's probably my all-time favorite right there. Another really useful way to do this is to go to SEO tools, search engine optimization tools, and SEO planning tools. Google, Google Ads, as you might imagine, is one of the biggest ad tools in the world, and they have a free keyword planner. You might have to create an account, but the account is free. And I believe they used to— I don't know if they do anymore— but they used to ask for a credit card in order to create your account so that it prevents people from kind of spamming the system or whatever. However, they do not purchase anything. They're not, um, charge your card or anything. I remember setting it up a long time ago, and it just verified my ID. I have never been charged. So you do have to register, but it's a very powerful keyword planner because what you can do is you can give it a list of websites and say, hey, here's a bunch of websites like competitors, for example. Or you can give it a list of words and then it will tell you, based on these search terms, these are other search terms that people use when they're searching. So put in civil engineer jobs and see what all the other keywords are that people who search for jobs for civil engineering also search for. That's a very good keyword generation tool. Again, completely free. You don't have to place an ad when you're simply building the keywords. I'm going to see if it'll let me sign in pretty quickly without too much trouble. Yeah, it looks like it's going to let me in, but it is a little slow. We'll let that populate for a minute. Oh wow, actually, just as I said that, there we go. So here you can discover keywords, you can add some websites. Sorry, I haven't been here in a while, so it's saying if I want to go through the guide again, which I do not. So let's go ahead and discover some keywords. Uh, well, I don't want shoes, but maybe I want Civil engineer. Okay, how about PE for professional engineer and jobs or job? Okay, let's see what Google suggests. Remember, I'm not paying for this even though I am registered with my Gmail account. It's not charging me. This is simply a tool. Here's some keyword ideas. Some of these are going to be a little bit too obvious like Indeed jobs. Yeah, I'm not going to be using that. But how about freelance? Hmm, interesting. How about— I think the word jobs was, uh, took a lot away from here, so I'm going to remove that because I don't want it to be about jobs. Let's try to do civil engineering PE. There we go. So there's institution of civil engineers, um, here's a person or maybe a company, there's civil environmental engineering, civil engineering drawing, "how to lose weight," etc. So you can see how it starts to bring suggestions. Pay attention to the average monthly searches, which is the volume of searches, not so much the competition, because this is competition for the keyword, which affects the price that you pay if you were to buy an ad. What you're interested in is the volume of searches, not how much it's going to cost to buy an ad. So when you see something like 100,000, that's a pretty popular keyword. Versus 100, not such a popular phrase, okay. So here's Google SEO, by the way Microsoft also has a keyword planning tool. Another similar tool that is SEO related is a website called wordtracker.com, now this is not specifically designed for SEO specifically, it is, well it's not just for SEO, It's also for competitive research and market research, etc. So here again, you put in a keyword similar to what we did in OneLook, and then it'll come back and give you some suggestions. So let's see if we can put something in here like, um, bridge engineer or something like that and see what we get back. Never done this one before, so Not sure what to expect. Okay, it's giving me some names. Looks like some of these are names, some of them are companies. And that's about all you're going to get for free. If you register, you get a little bit more. You get 10 free searches. So, you know, this is usually a premium tool, but we're just using it right now to kind of get a little bit of an idea on what's out there for these keywords. So the rest of the tools that are listed here are dictionary-related tools. Now, you, of course, you know about Thesaurus and Synonyms.com and Synonym Finder. These are going to help you find words that are very similar to the words that you're using, not necessarily words that are related but different. So there's a use for this but if I put in engineer, you'll notice it comes back and says, okay, there's technologist, um, etc. So it can be useful to a degree, but you also have to do a little bit of lookup to make sure you're not searching for something— mastermind, I'm not really sure that's going to help. However, these are definitely good places to start for your words. Wordhippo is something completely different. While it's a synonym engine, It's also kind of a writer's tool, so it starts to expand on the idea of, um, what are other words for the same concept, right? So let's say bridge. What else is similar to a bridge? Flyover, overpass, ramp. You see, so this is not just synonyms, it's also a— it's designed as a writer's aid, so it helps you expand your idea of what a bridge is. I find this very useful, not as useful as OneLook reverse dictionary, but pretty close, especially in brainstorming. Gangway, I didn't even think of that, and that's definitely something I've heard in relation to bridge. Gangplank, on-ramp, etc. Aqueduct, of course that makes sense because it's a bridge, all right. Merriam-Webster, I think, should go up here because it's more of a dictionary. And the reverse dictionary is also a writer's tool. What this does is it asks you to put in a description, what it is that you're thinking, and then it comes back and gives you the words that would relate to that description. So it's like you put in the definition that's in your mind and it comes back and gives you the words for that definition. Crowdsourced vocabularies from, for example, PowerThesaurus, are are lists of words that people identify as related. So this is like asking a friend or a colleague, hey, when I say bridge, what do you think? And then they'll kind of brainstorm with you. Not the same as a dictionary definition or a synonym or keyword-based. It's completely different. Excuse me. But it is more brainstormy in that way. And then the last two I want to share with you before we wrap up here. Are BuiltWith and SpyFu. BuiltWith takes a completely different track. So we've looked at synonyms as 4 different things: related words with one look, keywords that people use for SEO, dictionaries and thesauruses, and jobs. This is the 5th kind, not any of the others. It's not job keywords, it's not SEO, it's not Now this is about what technology is related. So if you go to Built With, you can put in the address of a website or of a particular technology. Let's go with a website. Um, let's see, we'll go with, um, what's a good one? Let's use ere.com. Dotnet, a popular destination for recruiters. Okay, it's challenging me with a CAPTCHA. No problem, I am not a robot. And it comes back and it tells you, hey, these are all the technologies that are used on that website. Similarly, if you put in the name of one of these technologies it would come back and it would give you the names of other technologies that are usually affiliated, associated, or somewhat interconnected with that, such as frameworks, for example. So if you put in here— now the one drawback to this is this is basically definitively tech. In other words, don't expect this to be a tool for, um, tax or something like that. I put in PHP here and I can see.NET Nuke, I can see XAJAX, slim. So you can see how it starts to help you build a dictionary of keywords. The other one that's similar to this is SpyFu. What they focus on is analyzing the content of a website to tell you what keywords are related to that website. So really useful for like an association or an event, or, you know, something where it's an aggregate as opposed to maybe a company name. Let's look at the— I think it's AEIP if I'm not mistaken. Nope. But the AICPA. Okay, that one does come back. Great. So if you don't know what AICPA is, good, because that's actually a good example for how this is going to work. So I give it a website and then it's going to come back with some results. For example, how many keywords and what types of competitors, and actually give you a list of people that are buying, buying ads. Paying for ads that are related to these keywords, but it also gives you a list of other websites. So this can extend your definition of target websites. And down below, you just have a— oh, there it is. Here we go. Organic keywords. All of this right now is free. There is more that you can get if you register and even more that you can get if you sign up. If I click on View All Competitors, it's going to give me a limited list As you can see here, and then it stops. So you have to log in with a free account, but log in to see the rest of these. And if you want to actually do a pricing analysis and all that, that's where you pay. But just logging in with a free account will give you a pretty big list of all these other websites that are similar. And going back a little bit, actually, I could have just clicked on one of the tabs. It also gives you a list of keywords. The difference, if you're wondering, between organic keywords and paid keywords, Organic keywords are the keywords that are used in the website versus paid keywords are the keywords that people are buying in order to attract searchers that are searching for that content. Once again, it stops at 5, and the rest of these are— you have to log in. And as I mentioned before, look at the volume, not at the cost or whatever. So basically look at this, at the volume of keyword searches for that word. That's what's really telling here. All right, so that brings us to the end of our transmission today on Google Custom Search Engines. I hope you enjoyed the conversation today. We're going to do our next episode in a week, and next time what we're going to be talking about with regard to going gaga for Google, are the more advanced features that you can set up in a Google custom search engine. So we're going beyond the synonyms, we're going into the advanced settings, configuration, and other tweaks that you can do. And then the fifth and final episode will be using schema.org and Knowledge Graph entities to customize your search engine. So we're kind of getting, you know, really into the meat of the advanced stuff. So student— tune in, sorry, next time on February 26th to learn about Google Custom Search Engine advanced settings. Bye-bye everybody, have a great weekend.