Using Google Alerts to Monitor Your Business

November 28th, 2007 by Chris

Google has a very nice, yet I think unsung feature, called Google Alerts which makes it very easy to monitor aspects of your web business. It isn’t a new service, and if you’re a dedicated reader of this site and forum you’ve undoubtedly heard it mentioned before, but I don’t think I’ve ever spotlighted it and it certainly does deserve some spotlight.

So, how Google Alerts works is you basically feed in search phrases and every time a new result is found matching that phrase, Google will email you (you can also ask it to just send you daily or weekly digests).

So, you can input your name or your company name and find when someone says something about you or when something is attributed to you. You can also use this as a tool to detect copyright infringement. Sometimes people who copy articles leave bylines intact and so you can search for elements of those bylines and be notified when your articles are copied.

You can also use this to be notified when Google finds new incoming links pointing to your site. Not only is it useful to get a quick listing of those links without having to check your log files, but it also clues you in on when Google does backlink updates since you’ll suddenly get a few alert emails about new links.

Finally, you can just as easily monitor your competitors (or even businesses you have stock in), as well as monitor your own websites.

The cost for this service? Nothing, quite a deal huh?

Sure, there are other ways to do this same thing, for instance the spam-filled technorati, but since most of us doing website marketing are concerned mostly with Google getting the results directly from them provides greater value in my opinion.

So, if you haven’t started using Google Alerts yet, and I’m sure many of you already do use it, take some time right now and setup a few.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization, Website Management, Website Promotion » by: Chris

One Response to “Using Google Alerts to Monitor Your Business”

ses5909 Says:
November 30th, 2007 at 5:09 am
In addition, you can do the same thing with Google blog search and they now let you subscribe to that search in your feed reader so you can keep it all in your reader if you want.