mat t hewwo o dward.co .uk http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/the-ninjas-guide-to-google-alerts/

Matthew Woodward

The Ninjas Guide To Google Alerts

On 02.03.13, In Tutorials, by

For those of you who missed it, last week I published a post called ‘The Ninjas Guide To Google Alerts’ over atSearchEngineJournal.com.

SEJ is one of the biggest digital marketing blogs and is in the top 5k sites according to Alexa. The guest postgot exposure to over 600,000 monthly unique visitors as well promotion to 22K Twitter f ollowers and 29KFacebook f ans.

At the time of writ ing the post has been shared over 500 times and has 42 comments. The most popular poston SEJ in July only had 247 shares and 1 comment so its good to see that the post has been well received bythe SEJ community in comparison.

In my opinion Google Alerts is the most powerf ul tool any online marketer has available to them. However it isalso one of the most under utilised tools out there.

All Google Alerts does is notif y of new results via e-mail or RSS based on the search queries you enter.

That might sound a bit simple but it is a seriously powerf ul way of leverage brand, authority, traf f ic and sales.If you have overlooked Google Alerts in the past it ’s t ime to sit up and pay attention.

In my guest post I share all the Alerts I use personally, including the ones I use to promote this blog and coverthe f ollowing topics-

Monitoring brand

Monitoring competitors

Monitoring questions in your niche

Monitoring content distribution

Finding new guest post opportunit ies

Monitoring link building f ootprints

Monitoring site security

Monitoring shoppers

Regional based monitoring

Discovering new niches

How to setup Google Alerts

Click Here To Read The Full Post

BONUS TIP!

SEJ reader Kaushal Shah (f rom couponcodehut.com) lef t a comment on the guest post that has to be one ofthe most ingenious ways to use Google Alerts I have seen. Full credit f or the below goes to Kaushal.

Measuring Content Quality

When setting up a Google Alert you are given two choices. You can choose to receive Only the best results orAll results f or your given query.

Essentially Google Alerts gives you a ‘high quality content only’ f ilter and you can use this f ilter to measure thequality of the content in Google’s Eyes f or your own site.

Kaushal setup 2 alerts f or his domain like this

site:yourdomain.com

One of the Alerts is setup to deliver Only the best results and the other Alert is setup to deliver All results.

The theory is that when he publishes a post, if it gets delivered by the Only the best results Alert he has setupthen Google must consider the post as high quality content.

How clever is that?

The Sky Is The Limit

The sky really is the limit when it comes to Google Alerts. If you can search f or it, you can monitor it. If you getcreative with your Alerts there are no end of possibilit ies!

How Will You Use Google Alerts?

I would love to know how you use Google Alerts in your online marketing ef f orts. Do you have a unique way ofusing it that I haven’t mentioned?

If you don’t currently use Google Alerts, how will you use it?