Google Alerts is a great tool to help you track important brands or keywords related to your business. It’s free, too. But it seems like it’s overlooked by a lot of small businesses or freelancers. Let’s have a look at what it can do for you and how to set it up!
What Google Alerts Can Do
It’s always good to know what’s being said about your brand online. Or a competitor’s brand, for that matter. Google Alerts allows you to track any topic or keyword and find out when it’s mentioned in the news or elsewhere on the web.
With this tool, you’ll receive an email alert containing links to any places your chosen keyword has been mentioned. You can get alerts immediately or in the form of daily or weekly digests. You can also have them sent directly to an RSS feed. This option is handy if you want to automatically share news to an audience.
You also have the option of selecting where these mentions happen – it could only be in recognized news sources, but you could also include blogs, websites, or other sources. And of course, you can set the country where the mention was made (or choose “anywhere”).
This isn’t a perfect solution. It might not catch every mention. You can’t specifically focus on social media mentions, and those seem to get missed often. However, if you’re looking for something to start with, it’s worthwhile to use, especially since it’s so simple to set up.
How To Set Up Google Alerts
You won’t find many other tools that are as easy to use as this. It only takes a couple of steps and you’ll be on your way!
- Head to https://alerts.google.com. You’ll see a box to insert your search term. Below that, you’ll have some suggestions – your name (as it’s set up on your Google account) and your email address
- Type your search term. As soon as you start typing, Google will show additional information below. This includes configuration options as well as recent posts that contain your search term.
- Click the drop-down to configure your preferences.
- Click the blue “Create Alert” button.
And that’s it! You’ll start receiving notifications as they become available. If there are no results in the period you sent, you won’t receive any notification.
So if it’s a topic that’s not frequently talked about, you may go weeks or months without receiving anything. On the other hand, if it’s “in the news”, you’ll probably want to use one of the digest options so that your inbox isn’t flooded.
You can have up to 1000 google alerts, which is an incredible number. You can also use standard Boolean operators with them. For instance, you might put “chocolate covered ants” in quotations to only match the exact phrase. You could also add “+how to” to only get notifications about how to prepare them.
Conclusion
Google Alerts is a basic but useful tool to help you keep track of what’s being talked about on the web. It’s basic and not perfect, but it can provide you with an elementary way of tracking when topics are being discussed. Most importantly, it’s free and easy to set up, which means you lose next to nothing when you decide to try it!