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It goes without saying that there is an enormous amount of information available to marketers. It’s because there is so much out there that assembling a competitive analysis isn’t as difficult or time consuming as it used to be. Assessing the competitive landscape is essential to your marketing strategy as it allows you to determine where your business stands and helps identify competitors’ weaknesses and strengths.
Google Alerts is a (free!) tool that can help you monitor activity surrounding your brand, products, and industry without tackling constant reporting. At its core, Google Alerts is a “content detection and notification service” that sends you emails when new results for a topic show up in search. You can program it to send you information on news, products, and mentions of words or phrases.
For example, you can flag:
- Your business name
- Website URL
- Your industry
- Product name
- Your competitor
- A Twitter handle
Highly customizable, you can define how specific, how often, and how detailed you want your reports to be.
Reviewing topics and platforms will clue you in on trends and opportunities that could serve your business. Opportunities may include linking building, branding building, and collaborations. Learn more about each below.
Track Keywords
Google Alerts can clue you in on how your keywords are being used by others. This can be an excellent starting point for getting inspired for new content, angles, and opportunities. You may even be able to identify additional keywords.
Weather Alerts
You can track conditions that will be relevant to your business. An example of how this can work are specific industries such as roofer clients and generator stores staying up-to-date on weather patterns.
Anyone with a Google account can set up an alert to get notified whenever a big storm is coming in a specific state. Since strong weather increases the probability of roof leaks, this information can mean it’s time to increase bids on those locations. This can lead to more search volume and more calls, as well as more people buying generators for potential power outages.
In conclusion, receiving a relevant alert can you plan ahead and clue you in when you should increase budget or bids to those specific locations and take advantage of the higher search volume.
Track Mentions
Alerts can help you strengthen your Link Building campaign. Link building is an excellent strategy for businesses that blog. Basically, you promote your website on other websites by exchanging links. That’s where Google Alerts comes in handy. Instead of checking up on sites, you can set up an alert and let the notification come to you.
A more forward-looking approach, Google Alerts sends you mentions of your company and/or products. This can be a great exercise to help you identify websites, bloggers, and businesses that would be relevant for link building.
Track Competitors
Clearly, you wanna use Google Alerts to be up-to-date on what competitors are doing, but more than that, you will also get notified sales, promotions, and discounts. This can be your cue to create a counter offer and reel in those consumers.
Get Started
Now that we’ve reviewed the benefits, let’s set you up. It’s a quick and easy to do. We’ve included the instructions below. Check it out and get your alerts scheduled in less than a few minutes.
- Go to Google Alerts.
- In the box at the top, enter a topic you want to follow.
- To change your settings, click Show options. You can change:
- How often you get notifications
- The types of sites you’ll see
- Your language
- The part of the world you want info from
- How many results you want to see
- What accounts get the alert
4. Click Create Alert. You’ll get emails whenever we find matching search results.
Tadah! Stay tuned for more simple tricks to optimize your marketing strategy. To learn more about our services, please contact one of our strategists!
