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Top 10 Uses For Google Alerts

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As the new year approaches, it’s always a good time to step back and think about some of the processes and systems that you could enhance for your online business. Mike and I are certainly doing that. Below you’ll find one of the best tips (and it’s free) that we feel is important for any serious business – our Top 10 Ideas for Google Alerts. We’ll give you an update later about how we’re moving everything (and I do mean everything) online into cloud servers, but this blog post has a different focus – keeping an eye on the store. First we talk about monitoring your content and then dive into some advanced ideas for using Google Alerts.

First, Watch The Content

The beauty of technology is also the curse of technology. The beauty is that things are so much easier than they have ever been in the past. But the curse is that it’s also so much easier for hackers and content thieves, so you’ve got to be alert and mind the store or else they’ll take it from you. Here’s a couple quick tips that we highly recommend for keeping an eye on your site and making sure that nothing funky is going on.

If you have a lot of unique content on your site that is your bread and butter, then you need to be making sure that you’re not being ripped off. This is a bit of a touchy subject. With screen scraping and RSS and syndication, you will be surprised to find your content out there all over the place. Some of that will be legitimate use, but some will not, and there’s really no one that is responsible for protecting you, so you’ve got to do the police work yourself. While there are much more elegant and sophisticated solutions, we like to take a middle of the road “simple” approach. The simple approach is to use Copyscape.com and just periodically check your content. Now, this only works, of course, if you have a small volume of content. If you’ve got hundreds of posts, well, you’re going to need to get more sophisticated. Copyscape also offers a monitoring program called Copysentry which is extremely affordable at only $4.95 a month and it will provide weekly monitoring of your site content – a very wise and small investment.

Use Google Alerts to Grow as well as Protect

The next tip is probably one of the easiest and most often ignored tactics available. Many people, surprisingly, are simply not aware of it. Google Alerts. Google has the ability for you to set up “alerts” that look for certain things and then send you an email or even RSS when they occur. Now, I know that sounds kind of vague – but that is the beauty of it! It is extremely flexible. You can setup an alert to monitor any search phrase. So, for example, you can create an alert that looks for the domain name of your site and now anytime your site is “mentioned” in any content that Google indexes, you will receive an alert. This is a great way to monitor your online reputation, for example. If a customer posts a negative review of you or a great positive review – either way – you’ll see it because you’re looking.

Alerts can be extremely powerful if you step back and think outside of the box. Here are some great ideas of how you can use Google Alerts to step up your efforts online.

Top 10 Google Alert Uses

• Monitor Your Domain – This is the most basic but also one of them most important usages of Google Alerts – to monitor your brand and reputation. But again, you need to think outside of the box. When you see a site give you an unsolicited reference, for example, that is a great site to reach out to and propose a guest blog post exchange or perhaps a good place for you to consider advertising. Let the alert “plant the seed” and then think of how you can use it to your advantage.
 
• Monitor Your Name – Internet Reputation Management is becoming big these days. But you can do a lot of this yourself by monitoring your name and your online reputation. As you see an alerts on your name you can immediately and swiftly take action. This is especially important for businesses or professional practices that brand their own name – like doctors, lawyers, dentists and chiropractors for example.
 
• Monitor Keywords – This is another very common way to keep an eye on your primary keywords. Let’s say you have one keyword that is very important to your site. You can setup and alert for it and watch who is also chasing the keyword by seeing who is actively linkbuilding for it. This is a great way for keeping an eye on your competition. But don’t stop there – go outside of the box. Use the alerts to give you ideas on blog posts that you should write that are topical or news related to your keyword. Use the alerts to give you ideas for other related keywords that you see in the titles and content. Look at the alerts and see if you find any sites that would make good strategic partners or advertising opportunities.
 
• Get Notified When Content Is Indexed – The thing that you need to understand about Google Alerts is that they can monitor any complex search string that you can create. Google has many advanced parameters to searching such as “allintitle” , “site”, “info” and various other search modifiers. You can use them very creatively in conjunction with Alerts to do some extremely useful activities. One of which, is to be alerted when an important piece of content is indexed. You can simply use the “site:domain.com/url” syntax and when it finds a result that means your URL has been indexed.
 
• Watch Your Competitors – This is just as important as watching what is going on with your site and your name. If you are watching your competitors brand name and site as well, you will quickly discover things about them and their business that you could perhaps replicate in your business to become more successful. By seeing where they are referenced and how, you will begin to learn a bit about their marketing strategies. Don’t forget that you can include the “site:” directive in your search to limit results to those that are only found on a specific site. This is great if you want to see what your competitor is blogging about, for example.
 
• Watch Your Linkbuilding Efforts – Google Alerts can be very useful when you’re doing article submissions or other linkbuilding that is content specific. If you control the content, you can include a keyword phrase that you use to monitor the effectiveness of the content distribution. If you are building your own database of links to your site (something we encourage) then you can watch these alerts and add the links to your internal tracking to keep them indexed over time. Another trick here is to set the alert on the author name and use different pseudo names to track different efforts or strategies independently.
 
• Monitor Related Discussions – Looking for some great related backlinks? Set up an alert to monitor discussions for a related keyword phrase and then “join in” the discussion by dropping a relevant comment and link back to your site. This will help you find the sites and discussion threads that are most lively in your niche and highly targeted to your specific keywords. When you set up a Google Alert you can choose to monitor everything, discussions, blogs, news or other categories of information. So you can go as broad or narrow as you like to get the exact results you are looking for.
 
• Find Topic Ideas To Write About For Your Blog – This is so easy to do. We all get “writer’s block” every now and then when we just don’t know what to blog about but know that we want to keep feeding the Google content monster. Setup a complex search string that looks for several of your top keywords via an “or” phrase and create an alert for it. Or, alternatively (and easier), just set up several alerts for your main keywords – either way, you will be feed information that is related to your topic and it will give you inspirations about what to write about or “respond” to. This can be a great way to quickly and easily get fresh new content onto your site.
 
• Find Local News and Information – Many people are familiar with some of the basic search operators like “allintitle:” or “site:”, but there are many, many more and one of them that can be very useful if you are looking for localized content or discussions is the “location:” operator.
 
• Advanced Programmatic Evaluation – This not for everyone, but you can use Alerts to track different situations that may shift over time by programmatically outputting a certain phrase that you have a predefined alert setup to monitor. This is really far beyond the scope of this article, but the concept is to use the advanced search qualifiers of Google in conjunction with custom programming to create real-time monitoring of certain situations. Using your creativity a bit, you can even build an automation system that is driven by alerts to take certain programmatic actions automatically whenever the program receives notification via the Google Alert or RSS. For example, you could programmatically scrape your Alert generated RSS feeds for “questions” in discussion groups that you could provide the answer to.
 

Summary

Google Alerts can be a powerful tool to add to your arsenal, but, like anything they can be over used as well. A good approach is to start out simply and add to your monitoring over time. Remember that the more precise you are with your search strings the better results you will get. Goes back to that age old programmer’s mantra of garbage in, garbage out. So spend a little bit of time refining your search so that you get good quality results from the alerts.

Got some great uses of Google Alerts that you’d like to add to the list? Please leave us a comment below and tell us about them…

 

Tags: advanced google alerts, google alert ideas, google alert suggestions, google alerts for seo