The Internet is full of branding opportunities. Your website, blog and social media pages all work to help you be both better found by consumers and recognized as an industry leader they want to do business with. As your brand continues to grow, the more chatter there inevitably will be out there about you—good and bad. As people write reviews about your products and services on their own blogs, people post pictures of your brand on their Facebook page or the news runs a story about you, the question becomes: How do you keep track of it all and how people see your brand?
Google Alerts are a small, yet powerful free tool that helps you monitor your brand across the web. They’re absolutely easy to set up, and provide you with a digestible email that notifies you (or alerts you) anytime the keywords you have set up as an alert are used. Those keywords can be everything from your specific brand name to your actual name, and even key phrases that can be beneficial for brand research.
How to Create a Google Alert
Want to get started monitoring your brand? Head over to Google Alerts and:
- Enter your brand name in the Search Query Box
- In the Result type pull-down menu, select from the following options:
- Everything
- News
- Blogs
- Videos
- Discussions
- Books
The default is “Everything”, and selecting this option will give you the best brand monitoring.
- Select how often you’d like to see your emailed results. After researching this tool, we determined that once a week is the best option for brand monitoring.
- Select how many results you’d like to see.
- Only the best results
- All results
- Type in an email you’d like to have these alerts sent to and then press create alert.
Why Should I Create a Google Alert?
There are a number of reasons to create a Google Alert, but these are a few of the essentials:
Trademark Protection — Creating alerts will help you to monitor your brand and see who’s talking about your business on the web. A very practical application for this tool is trademark infringement. If someone is using your brand incorrectly, these alerts will make you aware of the situation so that you can take the appropriate action.
Social Listening – Each time your brand is used socially, you’ll be able to monitor what others are saying about you. Being able to take care of a less-than-favorable review on a local directory website can turn an unhappy customer into a happy one. And, finding where happy customers hang out on the web can give you potential new places to market your brand.
Keyword Monitoring – Have a unique product that has a one-of-a-kind name that you want to monitor? Creating a Google Alert for your product keeps you aware of what others are saying about it. Take those reviews and criticisms and utilize them to better your product, shift your marketing efforts or do some goodwill by responding and resolving any potential issues.
Once you’ve started creating Google Alerts, you’ll find that there are many applications for this tool. Because they are so easy to set up and manage, you’ll wonder why you didn’t set them up sooner.
If you would like assistance setting up Google Alerts for your business or brand, contact us today.
