There are masses of social transactions that happen online. Fresh new contents are released from time to time on blogs, websites as well as social media streams. To make it more simple Google alerts is a free and authoritative marketing tool. This tool assists in monitoring online links and keywords you’re looking for. News junkies can find it beneficial as they don’t miss out any news and can keep a tab for desired topics.
What are Google Alerts?
Google alert is a tool that allows you to know when your desired themes have conversed online. With Google alert, one can get to know about competitors and consumer’s considerations about the product. Google alert can also be mentioned as an online service that identifies specific keywords and delivers links to specific emails. This tool is considered effective for search engine reputation management (SERM) and keeps an eye on the internet. When fresh new mentions are found, it directs news to the user.
This tool is beneficial for monitoring competition and also social media. With Google alerts the user can monitor the web for fresh new topics and topics related to your niche. Google alerts also alerts the user at times when the user’s product or brand is mentioned online either in social media sites or elsewhere.
For Google alert to work, the user just needs to create an alert so that the latest details on a particular topic can be received regularly. The indexed web pages that are present in Google search results are monitored by this service. In that case, if certain posts with specific keywords are detected an email notification is received. There are a number of benefits with Google alerts.
Benefits of Google Alerts:
Google alerts are useful in a number of ways as they monitor conversations and let the user know as they may not be aware of it. Any business keeps growing and in that stage, there are more mentioning about the brand across a number of channels. It is highly difficult to monitor or listen to any conversations as the user cannot be present everywhere. In that manner, Google alerts assist business owners.
- Google alerts spy the opponents and lets the user know their status
- Assists in updating industry news and niche
- Phrases and keywords can be tracked from contents
- The network can be built within the niche
- Blog articles can be discovered and commented
- Quora questions can be found and answered
How to Set up Google Alerts?
In order to initiate a Google alert, the user should possess a Gmail account. The user should sign into the Gmail account first.
- The Google alerts page is to be visited initially.
- The keyword must be typed in on the same page, with preview more future results can also be seen. Your email address will automatically be set by the service as target alert delivery.
- The user needs to click on “show options”.
- The frequency of notification can be set with the help of “how often” in the menu option.
- In order to pick the type of websites, Google crawler should explore and deliver results, the “sources” must have opted in the menu.
- Language must be picked for the alerts.
- Region for alerts must be chosen.
- For ones who desire to receive all alerts, the user needs to choose “how many” in the menu option.
- The email address in which the alerts need to be received is to be mentioned.
- Create an alert button is to be clicked.
Apart from this, there are other configurations that need to be set while activating Google alerts.
How often:
The user can set the frequency about how often alerts are to be received. There are choices such as at most once a day, as it happens and at most once a week. Based on the popularity of the brand the choices work. A lower frequency would be better for a famed brand.
There would be more disturbances for a familiar brand. The message frequency can be adjusted based on the user’s schedule. It is also suggested to make accurate alerts and pick the right frequency.
Language:
Language can be chosen with Google service and the tool takes responsibility for the content and delivers accordingly. This option would be beneficial for non-English speaking countries that hold the same brand name. Based on your language, links can be obtained for originally created content.
Sources:
In the Google alert set up process, the user can pick the content type the service should search for on the internet with the mentioned keyword. The options available are discussions, video, finance, automatic, web, news, blog, and books. There is a drop-down list for specific types where appropriate options can opt. Based on your keyword, when you need all results the user should select automatically.
Deliver to:
The Google alert by default sets the user email as deliver to address and sends all corresponding alerts. The user can add another email or can also edit the same. The alerts are received in the form of RSS feed. Thousand varied alerts can be set for an account. Alerts can be removed by navigating to the Google alert main page and clicking on the remove icon.
How many:
The user can set the content quality by using how many options and receive alerts based on this aspect. There are two options present here, one is all the results and the other one is the best results. When best results have opted the user would gain alerts only from enhanced quality websites. When all results are picked, then alerts will be received whenever the service finds a match.
Country:
With the country option, the tool helps you make accurate configurations and receive contents based on visitors to a particular country.
These are the few options available with Google alerts where users can customize as per their requirements.
Usage of operators:
Google alerts can be set up by using the usual Google search operators. With Google alerts, unwanted results can be avoided and accurate results can be obtained by making proper use of search operators.
1. Minus and allintext:
To eliminate content having a particular keyword from the alert, minus (-) can be utilized.
Example: “fashion world blog- unisex”, with this query, link to webpages that have the three mentioned words “fashion”, “world”, “blog” can be received and “unisex” is avoided.
2. Quotes:
When your keywords are used as quotes, an accurate order can be set as they are in the content. This Quote is beneficial when more words are typed instead of a single word. When quotes aren’t used, Google alert hunts for the content with the keyword in any part of the particular article or post and in any order.
Example: “best wireless mouse”, with such quotes the service would hunt content that has the same phrase.
3. Asterisk:
With asterisk sign (*), Google alert retrieves all data except the ones with an asterisk sign (*).
Example: “best *wireless mouse”, for such a query the results would be “best cheap wireless mouse”, “best mac wireless mouse” etc.
4. OR operator:
Instead of using all the rules together, with the OR operator set alerts based on particular search rules. For example site: ramcosystems.info career OR products, the results for the query would be from the webpages of the site that possess products or career.
5. Site:
With the site operator, the user can look for pages in particular sites.
6. For example site:
ramcosystems.info career and for this query, the alerts provide results for this mentioned site that bears the word career.
7. Intitle:
The intitle operator can be used to find out articles or posts of a particular product. By using this query, contents containing your particular keyword in title can be obtained. The operator is beneficial for ones looking for software reviews on the web.
Example: intitle: “Ginger” will retrieve results that have “ginger” in their title.
Purpose of Google alerts:
Google alerts are beneficial and can be used for a number of purposes.
Backlinks:
By utilizing Google alerts in a proper way, new backlinks linking to your website can be monitored. In order to use this facility, the user needs to create an alert with a keyword that has a domain name.
An example would be cyberprogram.info; here hyperlinks can be tracked with the brand name in anchors by making use of an operator called inanchors. The inanchor: cyberprogram keyword can help the tool retrieve all results that have cyberprogram in the anchor.
Monitor competitor:
New data about your competitor can be tracked apart from the user’s brand. For this to work, the user needs to create an alert with the keyword of the organization’s name.
By this way, the user would receive notification and post of the opponent. This will help the user know the present competition status in the market and steps required for the upcoming period. This also helps the user to make an analysis of the data and move further ahead.
Subscriptions:
Email subscriptions are offered by many blogs for the latest posts. There are many sites that do not possess such an option. Google alerts help in subscription for many blogs and develops a list.
Trends:
A Google alert assists e-commerce businesses to broaden their product list. New products and trending list can also be discovered. Online marketers can get to know what can be added to their list to enhance profit. A simple example is using the keyword, trendy shoes and small shoe shop owners can find the secret for enhancing profit.
Vacancies:
Job searching on LinkedIn and another online job posting sites is a time-consuming task. There may be few jobs that you’re interested in and may have expired. In this case with the help of the site operator, alerts can be created to respond to vacancies.
The latest job opportunities are posted by organizations on websites timely and users can react at specific times using a command such as a site: google.com vacancy OR jobs OR job.
Plagiarism:
Plagiarism can be checked with the internet as there are many tools available. Also, web pages that have content copied from your side can also be detected. Google alerts for checking plagiarism is done by entering the phrase from your content and results with a precise content match can be obtained.
Tips to make the most use of Google Alerts:
- Users can make use of multi-word search terms where alerts can be limited for a particular phrase.
- Multiple alerts can be created so that common search queries can have different variations.
- With RSS feed, alerts are directed to the RSS feed and not to Gmail
- Google Inbox can be used to gather alerts and avoid email clutter.
These few tricks can be used to obtain better information from the various tools available. Hence the best use of Google alerts can be utilized.
Google Alerts to enhance business:
Google alert can help businesses to grow in a number of aspects. Google alerts helps the user to monitor the brand, monitor the competitor, track local content, monitor questions in niche, measure quality, monitor content distribution, getting guest post opportunities, find new niches, monitor site security, obtaining instant job alerts, getting next freelance gigs, get to know about promotions and discounts, obtain local news, keep an eye on plagiarism, follow the desired author, etc.
Google alerts assists in such opportunities and lets you know a lot about the happenings in real-world competition. Such accessibility helps the user to take steps in business and move forward.
Conclusion:
The easiest tool for social media managers and marketers is Google alerts. The features of Google alert are beneficial for all businesses.
Business owners get to know the happenings with their competitors, present status of market and also react promptly to the negative comments that happen in their brand. Also, businesses can get to know the update if they are moving in the right direction with this service.
The best aspect of Google alert is that they can get to know the strategies that they need to change in their business. Hence any business either beginners or experts can create Google alerts and improve their businesses.