6 Great Uses For Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a great system that sends you an email you whenever a new page containing a word or phrase you have chosen to follow enters their search index.
You can create up to 1000 alerts on as many words and phrases as you like. You can also determine how often each alert is sent: “as it happens”, once a day or once a week.
And finally you can also filter the source of the content to specific part of the web:
- News
- Blogs
- Web
- Videos
- Groups
- Comprehensive (i.e. all of the above)
I usually choose comprehensive and then adjust the settings if there’s just too much information coming in.
Here are a few suggestions as to how Google Alerts can help you keep on top of things.
1. Simple reputation management
The most common use has to be for monitoring what people are saying about you, your clients or your competitors.
I have an alert set up on several client company names and receive a once a week alert on this. It helps me to see where on the web these clients are mentioned and measure the effectiveness of publicity campaigns.
2. Measuring search optimisation effectiveness
If you set up an alert on the title of an article you have written, an “as it happens” alert will let you see how long it takes for it to enter into the Google index.
For most of my blog articles, this is usually in about one hour whereas on certain other web sites, it can take a week. Alerts also let you see where else on the web your articles are mentioned (or stolen, see 6)
3. Monitoring the launch of new products
For my sins as a web designer I’m interested in tracking developments in the latest versions of web browsers. Google alerts keeps me up to date with new releases of all the major browsers and lets me track the opinions of commentators on the same subject.
4. Trend spotting
If you have a hunch that something is going to be big or want to follow the development of a story, Google Alerts can help you with this as well. Over time you’ll start to notice the volume of alerts on particular subjects rise and fall and you may also be able to determine what caused a story to snowball.
5. Alerting you when hard to find items become available
If you’re looking for an out of print book or a classic pair of trainers, Google Alerts does the business, but patience is the name of the game.
6. Content theft
My bug bear. It’s a sad fact that as soon as you post something on the web, someone nicks it and publishes it as their own in order to have content on their web site so they can keep visitors coming and generate advertising revenue.
How much you can do about that is debatable, but it’s at least helpful to have an idea of who is doing it.
So How Do I Create A Google Alert?
Creating a Google alert is really easy.
Just go to www.google.com/alerts
If you don’t already have a Google account, you’ll need to set one up. If you do have one and you’re already signed in, just enter the word or phrase you want to track, set the frequency of the alert and set the comprehensiveness of the filter.
Use quotes for exact phrases to avoid being deluged with emails. e.g. to monitor the term “Liz Hurley” enter it in quotes rather than as Liz Hurley without the quotes.
That’s all there is to it. You’ll soon start to receive updates on any new content that Google finds.
Managing Google Alerts
To add more alerts, edit or remove existing alerts, just go back to www.google.com/alerts
But there’s an even easier way to manage your alerts than that. At the end of each email alert that you receive, there is a link with the option to delete the alert, change the settings for that alert or set up another alert.
If you’re using Google Alerts I’d be interested in hearing about the ways in which you use the service.
