By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki)
At face value Google Alerts comes across as a simple single purpose tool that’s only good at monitoring the web for new content. With a little bit of tweaking you can do a lot more with Google Alerts to help monitor your client’s web property, reputation and content.
Monitor Your Client’s Name
This basic approach allows you to monitor your clients name, product or branded term. To do this, simply put your client’s name into the “search query” field, leave the result type set to “everything” and then fill out the rest of the form to create an alert. Depending on what you selected from the “how often” dropdown, this simple alert could send you an email every time Google indexes a page that contains your client’s name. All in all, a pretty quick and easy way to see who’s mentioning your client out there on the web.
This is by far the most basic form of a Google Alert that most people might be familiar with. As useful and simple as this alert is, you can do much more with Google Alerts to get different and more specific results for your client. Here are a few more ideas:
Monitor Links
Want to see what website’s are linking back to your client’s website or blog post? In the search query box type this: link:http://www.my-website-name.com. This is a great way to see what other sites have referenced your client’s website or content. Not only can you see who’s referencing your client but identifying who these sites are might offer further networking and outreach. If you only wanted to monitor blogs, select “blogs” from the “result type” dropdown menu.
Monitor Plagiarism
Want to see if another site has plagiarized your client’s content? In the search query box simply add a unique sentence from your client’s materials. You’ll get an alert if another website has used the same phrasing. Keep in mind that the site in question might have quoted the text so be sure to fully read the article that spawned the alert.
Monitor a Specific Website
Rather than setting up an alert that monitors the entire web, an alert can get set up to monitor a specific website. This is a great option if you know what websites might be mentioning your client or content. To do this, type this in the search query box: “what you want to monitor” site:http//site-you-want-to-monitor.com. This technique is also a great way to monitor Craigslist for stuff you are looking for. As you can see I have several alerts set up for some car parts. When a part gets posted that matches my term, I get an email.
Monitor Local News
This is great if you’re interested in monitoring local publications from a specific state for your client. Google alerts will recognize state codes in your query so you can keep a close eye on a specific state’s news. First, make sure that you have “news” selected from the “result type” dropdown menu as this functionality doesn’t really work with other result types. Then add a location to the query. So, if you wanted to monitor local news in New York for your client, this is what you would put in the query field: “term you are monitoring” location:ny
Monitor the Competition
Most of the above techniques can be used to monitor your competition too. Simply replace “clients” with “competition” and you can have alerts set up that monitor what your competition is doing on the web.
Google Alerts can be extremely helpful and useful. Pretty much any advanced Google search technique can get integrated into an alert. You just need to experiment and get creative with it. Check out this infographic on “how to use Google search” it might provide some more inpiration for a Google Alert. Also, if you want explicit results be sure to wrap your search term in double quotes. This will limit the results to exactly what you are looking for.
With a degree in communication design from VCU as well as experience in web development and digital marketing, Jason brings a unique blend of assets to CRT/tanaka. In 2012 Jason helped win 4 awards for his SEO work on PureCanadaMaple.com. Outside of his digital work, Jason enjoys brewing his own beer and restoring his1970 Chevrolet Nova. Jason is a new father and enjoys spending time with his family and his 150-pound English Mastiff.
This is a very useful tool for all of us. Thanks for sharing this, we can definitely leverage Goggle Alerts in keeping track of our clients’ online reputation.
Hey Jason
Some great tips in here and this is definitely something most of us neglect.
Apologies in advance for the shameless plug, but my company has created a tool called Change Detect (http://www.competitormonitor.com/text-change-detect-page-135.html) – all you do is plug in the site(s) you want to monitor and as soon as anything changes on them it alerts you to it. Really handy as you can imagine as it means you don’t have to trawl through the sites yourself ever again.
Worthy of a spot on your top 5 tips? Bit late for it I guess! Maybe do a top 6 tips next! :)
James
This is a great and necessary first step in monitoring yours (or your client’s reputation) but it doesn’t monitor reviews that are being left in Google+, Zagat, Yelp, YouTube or other sites. What you need is a tool (like I have) that monitors those sites specifically for reviews. Then you’ll be cooking with gas!
Basic stuff people! Shocked to see how many people can’t perform basic search functions! That being said, I didn’t know about (or forgot) about a few of these myself, good post :)