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Google Alerts

What is a Google Alert?

One of the best and most under used Google feature is Google Alerts. This is an automated search bot that trawls the internet looking for content based around key words or phrases that you give it. Its extremely easy to use and a very useful tool for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

- You can set up an alert for yourself or your own business. This can help you manage your own presence and reputation on-line.

- You can set up an alert for your competitors, allowing you to monitor their presence and reputation on-line.

- You can look at the sites that carry news or articles related to your business, identifying them as quality back-linking opportunities.

- You can use Alerts to follow breaking news stories or debate.

How do I use Google Alerts?

Below are some suggestions to get the most out of your Google Alerts:

Use your business name and personal name. Are people saying good things or bad things about you on-line? This is your opportunity to thank the good ones and address any issues that are being published on-line.

Set up an alert for your website URL without the www. This will help you find out who is linking to your website and talking about your website.

Understanding your competition. Who is doing the best job on-line in your sector? Create alerts for their name, track them and learn from them. This will help you with your on-line strategy and open up new opportunities.

Industry Information. What is the latest news and developments in your industry? This is very useful for giving you ideas for blog posts and news articles to add to your website and to talk about on social networking sites.

Prospective new clients? Understanding their company and learning more about their on-line activity will put you one step ahead of the competition.

Back linking opportunities. Blog links are sometimes the easiest for finding a place to link back to your website as they are well set up for comments. When commenting, add interesting information and answer questions on these blogs and include a link to your site, in this way your post is more likely to be accepted by the blog moderators. 

You will soon find the alerts that really suit the information you find useful. Some will inundate you with far too much information which will take forever to wade through. Delete these and concentrate on the good ones.

Tips and Tricks

If you're interested in something that's a real name then put it in quotes. So someone's name is "Dave Sharp" or "Virgin" if its a business name. It helps the search algorithm understand what you're referring to.

Use the + sign to help remove words from within words. So if you're interested in hands then the search will be +hand. This will then remove things like "handing", "handler" and "handling" from being caught up in the search. The plus indicates to Google Alerts that your just interested in the term "hand".

You can use the minus sign to help you in the same way, especially with place names. So there is a Durham in the UK and a Durham in North Carolina in the USA. So to focus a search on Durham in the UK the Google Alert reads Durham -carolina. This tells Google Alerts to remove references to Durham that also include Carolina. It will not remove everything from the USA but it will get rid of most of it.

You can search a specific website using a Google Alert:

If you want to focus on the Techcrunch website for news about Mark Zuckerberg then you would use:

site:techcrunch.com "mark zuckerberg"

This Alert will just focus on Techcrunch and Mark Zuckerberg.

You can also use the minus sign to ignore a site in the same way so that would read as:

"mark zuckerberg" -site:twitter.com

This will trawl the entire internet for news and references to Mark Zuckerberg but will ignore all the references on Twitter.

Summary

I use Google Alerts a lot. I find them extremely useful for just harvesting information that I don't have the time to research myself. Its good reading material when I'm on the road or have 15 mins to spare. Its worth spending the time to (a) get the hang of them and (b) refining them so they deliver useful information. It can take a bit of time but the best decisions come from the best set of information.