Buy Gin Online - How To (part 2)

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Part 2 - Optimise your search

Following on from part 1, where we helped to establish your taste preferences and looked at coupons and deals..

Using Google effectively is your key to finding exactly what you want and not what companies are paying for you to find.
You may struggle to find that little known artisan gin before its the next big thing if you can't search the web effectively, as the big companies are pouring their advertising budget into laymans search terms.

Use important words only

The first caveat many people fall for is asking a direct question or searching for a phrase without specifying to Google that it is a phrase.

It's important to realise that Google does not work like this by default and will apply an even weighting to each word in your phrase. You may have noticed, it often returns results that contain only some of those terms (at the bottom of each result you'll see “missing: x, y , z”). For instance:

how to find a good bathtub gin that matches with orange dessert

will equally favour results for find good bathtub, good dessert orange, find gin dessert, good orange matches, etc.
By the 4th result, Google notifies us the results are already missing “bathtub” - which is likely to be a critical identifier.

Putting “bathtub” in quotes, tells Google the results MUST INCLUDE bathtub, therefore

“bathtub” gin orange

while perhaps not optimum, is a clear improvement on the above.

Specific phrases

Which brings us on to specific phrases. Just like individual words, if you're after a very specific phrase, put it in quotes.

"London dry" will search for that literal phrase, whereas London dry will search for both London AND dry separately and probably give you some weather related results! Therefore, a search for

best gins for cocktails with pineapple juice

would be better phrased

gin cocktail "pineapple juice"

Looking at a more general phrase,

"buy gin online"

will prioritise content containing all 3 of these terms, scattered throughout the document with some weighting towards the words used together.

Still, You could easily end up with content that reads "Buy rum from us and you won't ever have to think about gin online again."
In reality of course, there are so many gin retailers online now, with a lot of them specifically targetting such a phrase, that you can expect some reasonable results!

Boolean operators

Google defaults to calculating your search using the AND operator between keywords (it's like a sum, except with words not numbers).

When you search for Brighton Gin you're really asking Google “what documents contain “brighton” AND “gin”

But in addition to AND, you can use OR or NOT. So

brighton OR manchester gin

will search for both Brighton gin AND Manchester gin together.

London dry gin NOT pink

will search for London dry gin but not pink London dry gin.

The NOT keyword can also be substituted with a hyphen for brevity "-"

Like in maths, parentheses will also help you clarify your intentions and control your terms better. Some effective searches may therefore be:

(Edinburgh OR Manchester OR Newcastle) gin -"london dry" or Herbaceous Gin -liquorice or gin cocktail NOT pineapple

More Operators!

Related (~)

using related: or ~ (tilde) will search related words as well as the word you specify.

gin ~"gift box"

will search for gin gift boxes as well as gin gift sets, gin gifts, gin presents and other variations of gift box -all at the same time!

site:

If you've already identified a store that has an offer you want to take advantage of but don't know what you want yet, you can search within that site.

site:theginboxshop.co.uk Citrus

Will Search for the word Citrus within that site only.

intitle:

puts that specific term as required in the page title. i.e

gin cocktail bar intitle:professional

link:

Search for sites, that provide link to a specified site. For example

link:https://annodistillers.co.uk gin shop

will search for gin shops that LINK TO Annos website.
It is likely if this the case that they have a strong relationship and have a good price on Anno gin.

VS comparison

You can compare products side by side using a VS comparison. This doesn't always work, but at the least will return articles comparing the two. If you've ever Googled "pear vs. orange" you'll know what I mean - Googles personal contribution to the results is usually a breakdown of their vitamins, energy/fat levels etc.

We wouldn't be surprised in the future if this type of search directly compared botanical additions to the two gins side by side. i.e

(anno vs. brighton) gin