Do you want to receive alerts when your name, your organization, or your more significant keywords are mentioned somewhere online? Google Alerts is one of the best Google apps that let you do that, and it just takes a few minutes to set up this free service. Here are some of the important benefits of creating Google Alerts and a step-by-step guide to get started.
What is Google Alerts?
Google Alerts is a free service and a useful online tool that Google offers to anyone online. It is best for companies that need a simple way to check their online presence and as it is free, it does not need any investment. This free monitoring tool notifies you whenever a new page or any kind of relevant content that consists of a phrase or keyword specified by you is indexed by Google.
This procedure is not real-time, and the media monitoring tool does not work like a regular newsletter as it can take Google a few days to index new pages as they are formed. However, for several social media marketing professionals, using Google Alerts is nearly as good as getting real-time updates on significant issues from the internet.
If you have ever done Google searches or manual media checking for a keyword to dig up new info or find out where you have been mentioned online or what people are discussing about it, you can use Google Alerts to accomplish a similar thing in a more efficient way.
Receiving google alert email ensures that you will not miss any ambiguous or out-of-the-way results or news stories for your keyword that does not show up in the first few pages of Google. And, obviously, it is a lot faster and simpler to get an update alert than it is to repeatedly search for a term on Google yourself.
Benefits of Creating Google Alerts
Google Alerts has a lot of prospective applications for marketers, social media professionals, and online reputation managers, and content marketers. Here you will learn how to use Google alerts and the benefits of creating Google alerts.
Track mentions of significant names
Maybe you would like to know who is talking about you, your company, or someone else online. Set up alerts for the brand names or product names that you want to track, and you will catch mentions while they are still new. Setting up alerts is one of the best ways to stay on top of your reputation.
Track the brand of your Company
You can receive Google alerts when people talk about your company on the internet, no matter whether they are saying negative or positive things.
Keep a track of your competitors
Sure, you must receive google alerts to know what people are discussing about you as well as your company- but it is equally significant to examine the web or new developments that include your closet competitors.
Track your keywords
One of the significant benefits of creating Google alerts is Google alerts keywords help you to strengthen your keyword strategy by showing you how others are using your keywords. This can help you to find new blog post ideas, unique content angles that other content writers have not covered till now. It can also help you to find other relevant keywords.
Build links
Another in the list of various benefits of creating Google Alerts is it can be used for building links. There are many link building guides but just a few of them mention Google Alerts as an important source of doing lick building activities. Whenever your product, service, or business is mentioned on a blog or a public question and answer forum like Quora, you have a useful opportunity to create a backlink. Utilizing customized Google Alerts will help you to find as many of these prospects as possible and jump on them while they are still fresh.
Find Plagiarism
Maintaining a company’s blog has become a necessity. As per a HubSpot study, commercial sites that include blogs attract 55 percent more audiences and 97 percent more inbound links than sites that do not have a blog. Even if you do not write blogs, much of the text on your site is regarded as your proprietary work, and you do not want people to copy and paste it. You can pay a fee every month to companies like Copyscape to check the Internet and make you cautious regarding people who are publishing your content saying their own, or you can just put the keywords from your work into Google Alert for tracking them for free of cost.
Ways to Set up alerts
Not sure how to use Google Alerts? It is simple! Here, we will explain to you a few steps that will help you to create your own customized Google Alerts. To start with, you will require a Gmail id.
- Visit www.google.com/alerts
- Enter the search term about which you want to receive notifications ( it can be anything, like executive name, industry topic, product, or competitor)
- Choose “Show Option”
- Select the time how often you would like to get google notifications and fill in other information
- Enter the Google Inbox RSS feed where you would like to receive the email news alerts
- Click on the “Create Alert” button
How to make the most of Google Alerts
Now, when you know how to set up google alerts and benefits of creating Google Alerts, let us find out ways for making the most of it.
Google Alerts could not be much easier to set up use. However, beyond the “beginners guide” there are still a few tips that you must know to get as much information from the online tool as possible.
Use common misspellings of your search terms. Google is getting improved at finding and correcting misspellings automatically but is it still good to cover all your bases and not exclude results that could be important for you.
Use different quotation marks about multi-word search terms and restrict your alert if you want your results to include only that precise phrase. You can even use other common search symbols to enhance your search. For instance, use the “+” operator in front of a specific word to get Google alerts with that specific word included in the results.
Create different alerts to cover multiple variations of common search queries. You can make nearly 1,000 alerts with all Gmail accounts you have, so you must be thorough.
If you use an RSS feed, you can have your Google alerts sent there rather than in your email. This also avoids your email inbox from getting jammed.
Make use of Google Inbox to batch your alerts to avoid email clutter. You must access your inbox by visiting https://inbox.google.com/. Each of your google alerts will be displayed below a single expandable header. To see the details about each individual page that includes your search term, you must click on the header.
Conclusion
Google Alerts is a powerful tool for which you do not have to pay any extra money. You can utilize it for many other things that are not covered in this article, so do think around and be creative.