Google Alerts - Manage Your Online Reputation
Transcript
Speaker 1: 00:02 This is digital marketing tool talk, never miss out or fall behind on the latest digital tools for social media, SEO content reviews, and the entire digital marketing space. I'm your host, Brandon Hughes. Welcome back everyone. Today I want to talk to you about a another free tool that comes out from Google. It's called Google alerts and it's a tool that many savvy marketers are using, but a lot of people just kind of overlook. The Google alerts is an excellent tool for reviewing and monitoring your online reputation, whether it's for your brand, for your personal self, or even monitoring competitors out there and what they're doing in the space. So I'd like to share with you today a little bit about Google alerts, what you can do with it, how to kind of configure it real quick and hopefully you'll find it useful. All right, let's get into it.
Speaker 1: 01:04 So this tool is free and if you go to google.com/alerts, that's where you'll set everything up. Let me share with you a couple of things that you can actually do when you use this tool. One thing that you probably want to do is you want to monitor other sites that republish your content. So maybe somebody is taking your content and just using it without your permission or maybe they are using it with your permission, but they forget to credit you or to give you a backlink. Then you can follow up with them. It will set an alert for you, those, that, the other thing you can do those that do repurpose your content or reuse it or share it and they do include a back link. If you are tracking it through google.com/alerts you'll get notice, you'll get a notice saying, Hey, somebody has a linked back to your content.
Speaker 1: 01:57 This is great. If you already have a relationship with the person, it means they followed through and, and it's all good. But let's say somebody posts content and links to you and you have no idea who they are. So it's a great opportunity to reach out to them. Say thanks, maybe start a conversation. Maybe they have other content that they're looking for that you can write about. Put on your website and have them link to it. Wouldn't it be awesome if somebody from a high domain authority or really known website posted your content or shared it? What would be terrible though is if they did it and you didn't know about it, so you can set up that kind of alert to get to get a notification when someone links to your content. The other thing that you probably want to know about is when someone mentioned your company or your business or your brand, you want to get an alert about that.
Speaker 1: 02:50 In addition to mentions of yourself, if you have a particularly large competitor or a singular competitor in your space, you can monitor their information and see when they're getting mentioned. Are they being mentioned in the press? Maybe they're doing something new and innovative. You want to stay abreast of that. You want to know what's going on in the marketplace. The other thing you can do in there is if you have a unique product, you can put the product name in there and get alerts. So obviously if you have something generic like let's say a lamp that's gonna be kinda tough to track, but if you have a Mandalorian themed lamp shade, you can put that in and in some certain parameters around it, and I'll talk about that in a little bit so that if that specific phrase pools up, yeah, you want to see mentions, you want to know if it's your product that's being mentioned, maybe a competitor just came out with that.
Speaker 1: 03:44 You can get alerted to that as well. Now, for some of you out there, maybe you're in a industry where key executives are critically important. Maybe it's a scientist, maybe it's an inventor, maybe it's a developer of some sort, somebody who has quite a bit of inherent value within themselves. So it could be you that's shocking yourself. Or maybe you want to track some of your key executives within your organization. You put their name in there. You can find out when they're being mentioned, what's going on. Again, same thing could be a competitor. It could be something, somebody in your space that maybe you follow as a leader and you want to track when they're getting mentioned as well. I've mentioned a bunch about competitor mentions. You definitely want to find out what your competitors doing, what people are talking about and how often that it's coming up.
Speaker 1: 04:37 In addition, you could also do industry type of thing. So if you're in marketing or manufacturing, you can do that specific keywords. You can put all of those in there and Google will alert you. They'll send it to you an email and let you know, Hey, this triggered, this happened on the internet. You can even set it by region. So if you don't want to monitor the entire planet and you just want to monitor your state or maybe your city, you can kind of limit that to just the area that you're in. So you can go to google.com/alerts. Go ahead and put your search terms in there. Take a look at some of the options. You can even have a Google inbox that or, or RSV, RSS feed dot. Alerts to you. It's a great way to stay on top of your online reputation, your reviews, and what's happening in your space in regards to your business.
Speaker 1: 05:32 And it's totally free. A couple of tips on putting together your search terms. You want to use a couple of simple things, like if you use a hyphen before the word it will exclude that term. So if there's some sort of search that you're doing and you don't want to include a particular word, you can exclude that. If you put quotes around a certain grouping of words, this will make sure that that grouping is together. So if you're looking for, let's say social media marketing, you want to put quotes around that and it'll look for that, that entire grouping as well. Those are some tips on how to use Google alerts. What it does and how it's a free tool. It's out there. It's been out there for quite a while. Some marketers are using it, some are not. There's a lot of paid platforms out there that can do a lot more than Google alerts does. But if you're bootstrapping it or you just want a couple of things done, then this is a great solution for monitoring your online reputation.
If you like what you heard today, please rate, review and subscribe to this podcast. If you have a digital marketing tool or tip that maybe you use or even one that you've created, let me know. I'd love to feature it on the show. I'll see you on the new school. Flip side.
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