How to use Google Alerts for business marketing success.
It’s important to track and monitor your business, as well as your competition, to not only survive but thrive. Google Alerts is one of the many free and useful online tools that Google offers to anyone and any business looking for an easy way to monitor their online presence without an expensive monitoring service. Unfortunately, a lot of companies don’t know about Alerts or don’t know how best to leverage this tool to their benefit.
What are Google Alerts?
Google Alerts will email you when words of relevance are published on the internet. If something included in your Google Alert is published online, Google sends you an email to notify you. Google Alerts are specifically geared for web searches, but you can also set up alerts for Google Scholar and Google News events. Google Alerts can be effectively used for your business in a few easy steps.
You can even choose how often you want alerts emailed to you: as-it-happens, daily or weekly. There’s no limit to how many alerts you can set up, and you’ll receive a wealth of information using alerts relevant to your business.
Don’t know how to set Google Alerts up? No worries, we’ll walk you through how to set it up later.
7 effective ways to use Google Alerts for business success:
1. Business/Brand
Google Alerts is one of the easiest ways to monitor online mentions of your company because once it’s indexed by Google’s search bots you’re notified by email. It doesn’t get much faster than that! You will know about mentions of your company in online articles, blog posts, social media conversations, and more across the web.
Create alerts for your business name and any key personnel in your company. Under “How Often,” set these alerts to report “As They Happen” because you want to know about these ASAP. This will allow you to see any coverage and reviews about your company as quickly as possible so you can either share the good news or take action to address negative things posted online. More about reviews.
Set up alerts on all variations of your company name and any DBAs as well as the legal names. If your company is mentioned on the web, you want and need to know about it!
This is good because you know what the word on the street is about you, but it’s also good if there is a press mention with your company in it. Knowing this will help you use it to your advantage in your PR strategies and outreach.
Google Alerts is a great way to stay on top of your” fresh mention” opportunities. Sometimes a company will publish your brand name, products, or target keywords on their site without actually linking to your website.
These are typically some of the easiest link building opportunities available, and great for SEO. Reach out to them and ask them to include a link to your website. It’s that simple!
2. Products/Services
Know when one of your products or services is mentioned online. Perhaps it was reviewed in an article that you can then engage with, or by a happy customer that you can thank.
3. Location
If you’re a local business serving a particular area you should set alerts for your geographic location. For example, a business located in Denver would want to keep tabs on what’s going on in Denver, and perhaps the entire state of Colorado.
This will keep you up-to-date on community events you might want to get involved in and to be aware of other local news and information that might relate to your business.
4. Industry
Google Alerts is a good way to keep up with industry news and trends. Set alerts to include relevant industry keywords and/or geographic information. Set up alerts around industry phrases to ensure you’ll never miss timely news updates, an opportunity to participate in a forum discussion or a chance to leave a thoughtful comment on someone else’s blog that relates to your business.
It’s also a good idea to create alerts for any organizations your company is affiliated with, like charity organizations you sponsor, professional organizations.
Set alerts for topics that are of interest to your customer base so you can use that information in email marketing, website content, on social, etc. Set these to provide you a summary of the best content every week – you probably won’t need these as they happen.
5. Customers
Track activity for your top ten or twenty existing clients. This can give you valuable insight into what they’re up to, and also provide you with reasons to contact them.
This is a great way to know what your customers are up to, so track the company name and key executives. Perhaps they just received an award and a note of congratulations from your company would be truly appreciated.
6. Competition
You should be keeping tabs on their competition to see how they compare. This is valuable information to use in marketing and a way to differentiate your business from others. Depending on your company’s competitive landscape it can be difficult and time-consuming keeping up with what your competition is doing.
But by creating monthly or weekly alerts, you’ll receive a snapshot of their activity. If you want to find out who is talking about your competition or where they are being mentioned, create alerts for each competitor’s business name and/or website URL.
7. Lead Generation
Use Alerts to track what potential customers are doing. If there is a company or client that you want to land, create alerts to stay on top of their most recent online activity.
This can provide valuable insight into what the company is up to and who is talking about them. It can provide a great opportunity to reach out to them when it makes sense.
How to set up Google Alerts:
- If you don’t have one, set up a Google account. Sign up here.
- Go to the Google Alerts page here.
- Add the word or phrase you want to be notified of in the “Search query” box. See our useful Google Search Tricks below!
- Drop down the “Show Options” which has a range of things you can change to your needs.
- Choose how often you’d like to receive each alert. You can choose as it happens, once a day or once a week. We’ve made a few suggestions in the list above.
- Click “Create Alert”
You can access your Alerts at any time, and edit them as needed.
Useful Google Search tricks to optimize Google Alerts:
Exact Keyword Search: You can specify exact keywords by putting a plus sign (+) in front of the word. For example, if you search for the word “publish,” Google search results would include “publishing” and “publisher.” Adding a plus sign to the beginning of the word (+publish) will ensure that you only receive exact matches.
Exact Key Phrase Search: When you search for a phrase, Google results will return anything that includes all of the words in that phrase, not that exact phrase. But by enclosing your search in quotes (“digital business marketing tips”), the results will only include that exact phrase.
Alternate Keyword: To return a search with alternate results, use “OR” between the words (the letters OR must be capitalized). For example, “author OR writer” will return results with either keyword. For a more complex search, you can put part of the phrase in parenthesis: (author OR writer) “business books”.
Synonyms: If you want your search results to return related terms, use a tilde (~) in front of the word. For example, if you use this feature to search for the word “~author,” Google returns results that include “book,” “writer,” and “literature.”
Search a Single Website: If you want to track new entries on a specific site, you can use the “site:” operator. For example, if you want to track mentions of website design on the EdOutWest website, your search would be: “website design” site:www.edoutwest.com.
EdOutWest has Google Alerts set up for all of our clients.
If a business is a client of ours we need to have their back should something come up.
And we want to know when something comes up right away so we can be proactive in how to handle this information if need be.
