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In any type of business, it’s very important to find as many ways as possible to attract more clients. On the internet today, there are numerous methods people in business can utilize to drive traffic to their website. But how do you keep track of how you’re doing online? One of the most helpful ways is Google Alerts.
Businesses of any size that operate mostly on the internet can benefit from using Google Alerts. This is another valuable service from the world’s leading search engine Google that is very easy to use.
What is Google Alerts?
Google Alerts is a notification or alert system that informs you every time Google finds a web page featuring your name, business name, your articles and relevant keywords. In fact, you can set an alert for any string of words you choose.
If you’re keen about monitoring where your business appears online or your articles are picked up by other sites in your specific niche, then it is worth your time to be using Google Alerts.
How to Set Up Google Alerts
All you need is to set up a Google account and once you have your username and password ready, you can start using this effective alert system.
You can decide which types of alert you’d like to receive. There are six categories available such as news, blogs, web, comprehensive, video and groups. You can freely set up an alert for each category if you want.
As to the frequency of notifications sent to your mailbox, you can choose to get alerts once daily, as it happens or once every week. There is also another option that pertains to email length. In other words, you can decide if you’d like to receive up to 20 results or up to 50 results.
Normally, you would use keywords specific to your business when setting up a Google alert. You can create as many as a thousand alerts if you like. However, you may have to first delete some existing alerts or you can request that the notifications be sent to a separate email address.
Alerts are usually sent in an HTML format. However, you can choose to receive notifications in plain text only except for the video alerts. All you need to do is to go to the Manage Your Alerts page and change the format of the emails from the default HTML to just plain text and you’re done.
As an example, I’ve set up a Google Alert for Savvy Web Women and chose the category blogs. What happens then is that every time my business name appears in another blog, I get an alert. Whether it’s the article I wrote or an event I did that was posted on that particular blog, I am able to track who is sharing my content, utilising my resources and adding links back to my site.
So by using Google Alerts, you are able to find relevant back links to your site that search engines value most when ranking websites and blogs. This should be reason enough to inspire you to consistently promote yourself and your business on the internet. Once you’re consistent and with your alert system all set up, you can just let Google Alerts do the monitoring for you.