In this fast-paced digital world, fighting for a top spot on the search engine result page has become challenging. It’s difficult to survive the cut-throat competition if you don’t have robust SEO strategies, audience engagement plans, and continuous improvement for commercial reach.
Much to the pleasure of marketers and SEO analysts, Google has made life easier with its free tools and tracking systems.
Apart from Google Search Console, Google Alerts has been a revolutionary tracking tool that continues to help seasoned SEO professionals in their digital presence. From reviewing market trends to analyzing competitors’ performance, you have every piece of information at your fingertips.
No wonder marketing professionals recommend utilizing Google Alerts to the fullest for added benefits and improved SEO metric scores.
Improve your website visibility and protect it from potential damage using Google Alerts. With our comprehensive step-by-step guide, you can easily set up Google Alerts for various issues.
What Are Google Alerts?
Google Alerts is a free tool that first came into being in 2003. Using this tool, you can easily track results for your search inquiries.
Simply put, the user gets an email or text notification whenever the search engine discovers a search result that matches your queries.
The search bot checks for the keywords a user mentions in their queries. Then the crawlers scurry through the net to find relevant answers.
The user is free to set the Google alert according to their convenience, i.e., on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. They can even set a specific time when the search engine can send the notifications.
For more streamlined results, a searcher can add various parameters by clicking on ‘Show Options’. The user may add the following factors for filtered and reliable information:
- Sources
Get results only from official sources or trustworthy blogs.
- Language
Read information in the preferred language.
- Region
It works best when a searcher seeks information from any country or region.
Google Alert is one of the crucial tools every marketer should know.
Why?
Because that way, you can keep track of the number of times potential customers have searched for your brand or want to place an order on your website.
Benefits of Google Alerts For Your Online Business
Google Alerts can monitor most topics relevant to your industry and provide a comprehensive report. Webpreneurs who aren’t using Google Alerts to its full extent are missing out on many benefits, like:
1. Monitors Online Reputation
In the time of digital brand communication, proactive monitoring of your business’s online reputation and that of company executives is essential. Google Alert helps you maintain and improve your company’s digital dominance.
Enter your company name and that of your executives in the search box. Apply necessary filters and let Google monitor every mention that matches the parameters.
Also, Google Alert tracks customer reviews, both positive and negative. Pay heed to the negative comments and improve your business services based on that.
2. Analyses Competitor Performance
Competitor’s performance analysis can teach you the most crucial SEO-oriented lessons.
Google Alert brings you a complete analytical report on the competitors in your industry. That way, you know your rivals’ strategies, market trends, and potential threats.
Further on, leverage this data to boost your SERP ranking, improve revenue generation, enhance conversions, and predict the upcoming changes in your niche. Studying digital rivals gives you a better idea of your situation and how to upgrade your business’s digital presence.
3. Examines Industry Trends
Staying updated with market demand and ongoing trends is essential to increasing brand sales. Because of that, every entrepreneur needs to understand their customer’s demands and pain points.
Mostly, they buy or consume products or services from top brands. Use Google Alert to understand how those brands satisfy their customer’s expectations.
For instance, you own a clothing brand. On Google Alert, put ‘sustainable fashion’ as one of the monitoring parameters.
The tool will scan the market performance and inform you of the merits and demerits of your business. It helps entrepreneurs improve and expand their peripheral focus.
3. Ideate Content Topics
Experienced SEO analysts have often emphasized that fresh and updated content can boost your conversion rate and traffic.
Generating unique ideas for all content types can take time, and you might miss out on some crucial industry trends.
Use Google Alerts to procure content ideas for your brand.
Set an alert on authority websites of your niche. Every time they post a blog or video, you get a notification.
Tips: You cannot use this opportunity to plagiarise. Instead, use it to take inspiration and create original content.
How To Set Google Alert?
Here’s a step-by-step you can follow to set a Google Alert for a particular topic:
Step 1: Visit The Google Alerts official website
Step 2: Enter The Search Topic
Under the search box, enter the topic or organization name you want to search for. If it’s your company domain name, don’t add http or www.
There will be an alert preview page for the site you’ve entered. In case of a new page, you might not get a preview page for Google Alert.
Step 3: Click on “Show Options”
It appears next to “Create Alert”. Enter the required option for each parameter. Here’s what most SEO analysts recommend:
- How often — at most once a day
- Sources — Blogs and Web. That’s because news articles can bring irrelevant results.
- Language — English or the one you want to read or write in.
- Region — Any region or country. You can also enter the region or country which you’re targeting.
- How many — All results
- Deliver to — Enter your email address
Step 4: Press “Create Alert”
The last step ensures you receive a notification once a day on your email.
5 Ways You Can Use Google Alerts For Overall SEO Cases
Google Alerts have several advantages that you can utilize to strengthen your SEO performance. From building a keyword strategy to driving traffic, a market analyst should know all the intricate benefits hailing from Google Alerts.
1. Find Unlimited Guest Posting Opportunities
Backlinking is one of the in-demand ranking factors for search engines like Google. The more backlinks you have, the more trust you earn from Google.
Therefore, build a robust backlinking profile with the help of Google Alert.
How?
This Internet tracking tool unearths guest posting opportunities for you.
Guest posting is when you write a blog on a third-party platform or for an external website or company with high domain authority.
How does that help?
It exposes your creativity to a broader viewership who might navigate to your website to consume more of your content.
Furthermore, you earn a backlink from the website for which you’ve written the article.
How can Google Alert help find guest-posting opportunities?
The trick is to enter guest posting strings like ‘guest post by’ in the search box.
If you specialize in writing lifestyle posts, use keywords like “lifestyle” and ‘guest post by’. These key phrases will help you find websites or companies that explicitly don’t advertise guest posting but accept them.
Another trick is to enter a guest author’s name in the search box. Google Alert will inform you of the websites where the person has written posts.
You can send pitches to the publishers on these websites.
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2. Find NAP Citation Opportunities
If you want to boost your business sales, add your business NAP to various niche-oriented website directories.
NAP of your business stands for name, address, and place. It lies at the core of local SEO.
The more you insert your company NAP on various web portals, the more your business will get exposure to a vast viewership.
Use Google Alerts to find your competitor’s citations and partially imitate them. You may enter strings that concern your rival’s NAP details.
That way, you’ll find the portals where they’ve added their details. You can then add your business to the websites your competitors have used.
What if your competitor is involved in SEO activities and gains new citations regularly?
Take a step ahead and set up a Google Alert for your competitor’s NAP details. Every time they gain a new citation, Google will notify you.
Consider repeating this process for multiple competitors for a result-oriented output.
3. Check For Link Injection
Link injection is a black hat tactic. Hackers may break into your website and inject spammy links into the site code.
You should know two types of link injections – spammy and non-contextual. While hackers use relevant anchor texts to embed spammy links, some use irrelevant ones to support non-contextual links.
Link injections can be challenging to spot. But leverage Google Alerts to identify and eradicate them.
How?
Set up an alert with keywords related to possible link injections. Ensure these trigger keywords are from your site only.
When you receive an alert for link injection from any of your blogs, use CMD to identify the trigger words. Moreover, you can use Ctrl+F to find the spammy anchor words.
4. Identify Indexation Error
There are instances when search engines index unwanted pages by mistake, like pages with URL parameters.
The URL parameter is a part of the URL that comes after the question mark. They are often used to pass on data.
These parameters can be active or passive. While active parameters change the page content, passive parameters don’t modify the content.
If you own a retail e-commerce store, indexing error is a big issue. Google Alert can help you identify this undesirable indexation and address them.
To do that, identify your page footprint. There’s no definite indicator, for it varies from page to page.
Some pages may have ‘cid’ or ‘pages’ in the URL.
Note: Pages containing both parameters are known as paginated pages. And Google shouldn’t index such pages.
Set a Google Alert that should look like this:
site: (site name) + inurl:cid + inurl: pages.
Doing so will identify the problem and nip it from the bud before it causes grave damage to your web page.
You can use the same process to avoid the indexing error of a few files. Suppose your page contains a few pdf files. You may not want Google to index them.
In that case, you may use the prototype file type: to set a tracking alert.
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5. Monitor Pages For Unlinked Brand Mentions
To rank higher, you must have a high backlink count. Google Alerts can help you achieve that.
Note: According to uSERP, link building “will have more of an impact on rankings in the next few years.”
Utilise Google Alerts to build backlinks and boost your Google ranking.
There are web pages where the hosts mention other websites without linking to the reference site.
Links are essential because of two reasons:
To Rank Higher in SERP
High-quality backlinks can raise your position by a few spots upward on the search engine results page.
To Navigate The Web
Interlinking allows both audience and web crawlers to navigate your website. A well-connected interlinking structure increases a user’s dwell time and decreases the bounce rate.
Therefore, unlinked mentions may prevent users from reaching your website. Thus, you lose potential customers, and your traffic doesn’t increase.
In such a scenario, approach the webmaster and request them to link to your website.
For that, you need to identify these unlinked mentions using Google Alerts. Set up the alert using your brand name or related term.
Google will notify you if the bots find any mention of your keywords on the web.
Set up multiple alerts on various brand-related terms. That’s how you can track down more unlinked mentions and readily address them for better-quality backlinks.
In this way, every alert will lead to earning a backlink.
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Verdict
Over time SEO professionals have begun to ask one question repeatedly– if Google Alert is enough.
The answer is diverse. While most deny the tracking tool’s limitation, a handful have pointed out its demerits.
However, like any other tool, Google Alert has its limitations. According to Ahrefs, Google Alerts’ biggest problem is ‘lack of data’.
It sounds surprising, but in a recent experiment, Ahref deducted that their tracking system produces more results than Google.
We know Google has a vast database of information, and its crawlers function faster than any other. However, while producing information, Google bots ‘pre-process’ its results.
Despite this limitation, Google Alerts is still relevant in helping marketers build a strong and reliable audience base. To gain better SEO results, we recommend you pay attention to this free tracking system and fully exploit it.
