How To Use Google Alerts For Business Competitive Analysis, Brand Protection & Link Building.
For any business it’s extremely important to look for ways to keep up with your competitors and if you’re smart staying ahead of them. There are several ways to conduct business market research. You can send spies to their store fronts or websites to snoop around. But that takes time and energy that your spies employees could be using to make you more money.
You could sign up for your competitors newsletter or mailing list. That’s actually very cost effective but if your competitor isn’t active in those fronts then it really serves you no purpose. Or if they’re smart they’ll boot your ass off their list!
Competitive Analysis
Why not hire the biggest and best aggregator of data on the earth today, My friend and yours, Google.com! Yeah I know they’re a "multi-gizillion" dollar organization and your company doesn’t have that type of green lying around. Well you’re in luck! Google will do all the spying on your behalf for a grand total of NADA, ZIP, Free! Best of all it will take literally seconds to set up.
Google alerts is a free service that will literally email you about anything you’ve entered in their system. So for instance let’s say I’d like to be emailed about the newest ipod? I would visit www.Google.com/alerts enter the keywords " new ipod" , add my email address, set my email frequency preferences, and what type of stuff Google should search under (Blogs, news, websites) and I’m done. It’s literally that simple and quick.
Obviously for the purpose of this exercise you should use your competitor’s name, website address, etc. This way if there is anything mentioned about your competition you can react accordingly if it makes sense. Google alerts are very quick to distribute information within the hour of an event happening. You can’t say that about most competitive analysis methods.
Brand Protection
Another benefit of Google alerts is that it can also be set up for your company’s name, website address, employee’s name, etc. It’s just as important to find out what folks are saying about you so you can step in when necessary to defend your honor (brand). Or if you have big pockets, sik your lawyers on them!
Link Building
My personal favorite use of Google alerts is to learn about where new links are being acquired by my competitors This way I can swoop down and try to acquire the same link. When I receive a Google Alert that my competitor was mentioned in a blog post, I immediately visit the blog in question and make a relevant and in-depth comment which incidentally links back to my site. This way folks reading the article will know that I’m also an alternative to the competition that they should check out.
So these are the 3 ways you can use Google alerts to your advantage.
I’ve gone ahead and created a short video on how to use this free service, feel free to check it out below.
I hope you found this information useful. Were there any other ways I missed on how to use Google alerts for your business? If you think so, post your comments below?
