They are:
1. Monitor yourself
2. Monitor your competitors
3. Find Customers
4. Spot emerging trends
5. Find who’s linking to you
Lets explore !.
Google Alerts is a simple tool that monitors the web for your ‘topic’ of interest and notify you, rather than you spend time hunting for same information.
All you have to do is: enter your keyword, choose content type, notification frequency, search result type and your email. Voila ! You are all set. Isn’t this a cool little tool ?
Lets talk about the various benefits businesses can obtain by using this tool a bit creatively!
1. Monitor yourself:
Obviously, you want to listen to what people are saying about your company / brand on the web. You want to monitor your reputation, you also want to act promptly if there is any negative reputation about yourself spreading around on the web.
So, enter your Company name OR Brand name OR Product name which is of interest to you and set the alert. You’ll start to receive who is talking about you, when and where and what !.
You will also know about the content sources where your brand is mentioned a lot and you can get active at those sources.
2. Monitor your Competitors:
You want to track what your competition is doing: a new blog post, new hire, new press release and so on. Just enter your competitor’s name / product name in the keywords field and start to receive a daily digest about your competition.
This will help you to assess your strategies on an on-going basis compared to your competitor.
3. Find Customers:
If you’ve already identified your target customers, and what they look for in the search engines, then it gets easy for you to locate them. Set alerts for keywords such as “Looking for…” OR “Sell …” or a variation of this, depending upon your product and the industry. Note, you’ll have to continuously tweak the keyword as per the results you get.
So, any mention of your keyword at any of the web sources (blog, discussion, News, Real-time etc), you can get an immediate alert. You can follow-up to find if its a potential lead.
4. Spot emerging trends:
This is a favorite subject of mine. You want to be on top of what’s happening in your industry. So, lets say we want to listen to what’s happening in the Lodging Industry, particularly in the Boutique Hotels segment. Here is the keyword setup:
[Lodging Industry + Boutique]
“+ Boutique” indicates you are specifically looking for this keyword in the broader “Lodging Industry” search. Using “-” instead of “+” will actually mark it as negative keyword and eliminate all searches that contains “Boutique”.
5. Find who’s linking to you:
You attract good traffic if you are back-linked to various highly ranked and related websites. So, you will want to find who’s linking to your website. And, the keyword will be:
Link: Loyaltics.com
The above will send a daily digest of all incoming links to our site. If you find a new link, then write to the site owner, establish a relationship and look for opportunities to work together.
So, How creatively are you using Google Alerts ? Are you using any other tools other than Google Alerts ?
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