Internet Marketing: Google Alerts for SEO.
How Google Alerts will help your SEO
Enhance your Internet Marketing campaign and the SEO work you do, by finding out more about what your competitors are doing on a weekly basis to improve their sites position in the search engines, with Google alerts.
We know that Google alerts is primarily there to enable you to retrieve news about subjects you are interested in and have them filter into a specific news feed, but all tools available on the internet and the uses for them can be interpreted in different ways. Although this tools wasn’t meant for SEO it has the power of generating a steady stream of reasearch information about your competitors, right to your news feed.
This information will help you find that edge of action you need to take to get your site onto page 1.
Lets say you are lucky enough to already have your site onto page 1 but it remains stuck at the bottom despite you continuing your link building campaign. The problem here often is that the other 9 sites above yours most likely also have an active SEO campaign running to maintain their position and are doing things to improve their site that you maybe aren’t.
Its not time to give up your fight and accept the place you site is positioned. This is the time to get clever and take further action using Google alerts!
To set up a google alert follow this link to google alerts:
http://www.google.com/alerts
Here you need to type in your search request and set the “type” to everything or news depending on which you are looking for and “how often” to once a day.
Your can configure the settings with Google alerts to send all the files to either a news feed which can be set up if you have a google account or if you prefer to your email. If you send it to your email it is best to set up a dedicated folder which you configure the settings in alerts to send all the messages to as you don’t want it clogging up your inbox.
Tips for things to set up your alerts for.
Two top methods for this are as follows:
The first recommended search to set an alert in Google alerts for is for each of the websites above you in the search engine, or if you haven’t yet reached page 1, for the ten sites already on page 1 by typing “site:urlofsitetocheck.co.uk”.
This will generate information on new content your competitors add. This lets you gauge and idea of how frequently they add new content and what new angles and ideas they are sharing about the industry.
Compare this to your own strategy to see where you need to up your game and put in more work. This helps you not only to increase the quantity of your content via blogging but it also indicates quality locations to submit articles containing links back to your site and boosting your content too. The data that is generated shows what aspects google indexes and gives a way of gaining knowledge on how to generate quality additions to your site. If it is working for your competitors it will work for you too.
The second method to use Google alerts for is to put in the search keywords that you are optimising for. This will show the new additions on the web that Google takes notice of regarding this keyword and again generating ideas of solid quality places for you to aim your SEO at. Its good to track not only the keywords you are using but also some others that you decided not to use at this time but may use in the future. You could also add the name of a particular product and see how others are promoting it.
When you enter a keyword search, google will produce data back to you in your news feed which is pulled from the first 20 page of the serps to alert of any updated content added. Its very useful for ensuring you are keeping up with the latest in the industry and ensuring that you keep the impression not only to google but to your potential customers that you have an activley maintained website which makes your company look more reputable.
Both of these methods give you alerts about your competitors and you can look at the new additions they add to their sites and see if what they have done will affect the performance of the keywords you are competing with.It helps you to gain that edge needed sometimes with SEO.
Google alerts is a massive research time saver and knowledge is power. The knowledge is what google alerts will give you and if used in an intelligent way, will help your SEO campaign.
June 15th, 2010
Nice information buddy! The Google Alerts is a content monitoring service that automatically notifies users when new content from news, web, blogs, video and/or discussion groups matches a set of search terms selected by the user and stored by the Google Alerts service and it really helps.
June 16th, 2010
Excellent idea I never even thought of using Google alerts for checking on competitors serps, content posting etc what a great way to use this tool – it’s a way of keeping track of new products as well!
I will try this and post back in a few months with results.