If you haven’t heard of Google Alerts, it’s a free service that Google provides to alert you, via e-mail, of the latest search results based on a query or topic of your choice. I recommend this essential tool for your business because it’s a way to track searches that are being done on your name, your company’s name, your product or service, and other key information.
How Google Alerts Works
To start creating searches, go to www.google.com/alerts. You will see this search box below where you create your alerts.
You can see that I am creating an alert on the search term “marketing blogs.” Since I have a marketing blog, I want to know how often people are interested in finding marketing blogs, how I rank in Google’s search engine, and what types of information people are writing about in their blogs. I placed quotes around the search term so that I get back specific results rather than broad and general ones. If I left the quotes off, then I will receive searches with the words marketing and blogs, which you can imagine would return many listings to my e-mail box.
Next, you select the type of alert from the drop down menu. You can select: News, Blogs, Videos, and Discussions but I chose, “Everything” to include all the types. Then, you choose how often you want to receive the alert in your e-mail: as-it-happens, once a day or once a week. Now you choose up to how many results you’d like to see in your e-mail box, up to 20 results or up to 50 results. Lastly, you choose the e-mail address where you want to receive the alerts. Google will then send you a confirmation link by e-mail so you can confirm your alert.
Google also has an area where you can manage your alerts so you can change the choices you made when you created it at any time.
How to Use Google Alerts
I recommend the following search terms to use with Google Alerts:
- Your personal name to see if people are searching for you and/or your business and where you may be mentioned on other websites and blogs.
- Your company name for the same reasons mentioned above.
- Your website URL, i.e. gtmsuccess.com so you can track people searching on your website or where it may be mentioned again.
- Your competition’s company name and website URL to monitor who is talking about your competiton and where they are mentioned.
- Your clients’ company name so that you can keep up-to-date with the latest news with their company.
- A key term used in your industry, which will allow you to monitor activity with your product or service on other websites and blogs.
- A developing news story in your industry.
- A title of an article you wrote online such as for ezinesarticles.com. Be sure to put the article title in quotes so you will get the exact title returned to you, if someone uses it on their website or blog.
Also, if you have a blog on a particular topic that is not too broad, say for instance, career coaching, you can see what has been written on that subject in the news, on websites and in blogs. This provides a perfect opportunity to now comment on that website or blog about your topic or industry. This can help build traffic to your website, especially if the site asks for your website address when you register to make a comment.
Below is a good video that explains in detail how to set-up Google Alerts for your business.
