I have spoken to a number of people about Google Alerts and a lot are not familiar with them or some have not even heard of them. So I thought it would be best to write a short blog post on how to use them for SEO.
By Google’s definition:
Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms.
http://www.google.com/support/alerts/
Watch Google watching you
One of the first ways I would suggest you use alerts for is to tell you when and where Google is finding you. You can watch where Google is finding your website links, your name and business name. You can set Google Alerts to send you a comprehensive email as it happens, so you know when Google is has found the keywords you are watching.
Keep an alert eye on your competition
You can also keep and eye on the competition. Yes that’s right keep your friends close and your competition closer. For example if you are a baker in Birmingham you will want to watch the key phrase "bakers Birmingham" and similar variations. You can then use the information to benefit you by using and improving on some of the tactics your competition is using.
Create valuable links
One other way that I will mention in this post is for creating links back to your website. By visiting the sites that Google Alerts sends to you about your competition you can find out what you need to do to get a link from them. Which for niche markets can be very valuable to you.
Well there something for you to start with let me know your findings.
5 comments:
I agree completely with your strategy of watching your competitors through Google Alerts. One thing I tell people to do is view the page source of any site that is listed in Google Alerts for their keywords. What type of tags do they have? How have they used the keywords in URL, title, headings?
Another idea is to use the related: operator with your URL and your competitors' URLs. This will tell you which sites Google thinks are similar.
I've written up a lot of these tricks in a free Google Alerts marketing tutorial:
http://www.alertrank.com/google-alerts-marketing.htmlI hope you find this helpful.
I've been doing this for a few days, unfortunately most of the town alerts I've been getting are in the States and I'm only interested in my town in my country! Any idea on how to make the results UK only?
I find Google Alerts to be very effective in finding things you would not otherwise uncover. Often I RSS subscribe or Twitter-follow what I've found.
They can also be a good way to track the visibility of your own blog posts. If my alert does not find one of my posts it forces me to think about why.
Thanks MrGoogleAlerts you are doing a grand job with your website.
Mina I have never come across your situation however I think if you change your location in edit your profile that may help.
Mina:
If you add site:uk to the end of each alert search term, only sites with that top level domain will show up. That won't, however, find pages from .com sites in the UK. For News alerts you can use location:uk to do the same thing.
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