Those who work with digital marketing know that ensuring a brand’s relevance in the digital world isn’t easy.

You need to create content aligned with your audience’s interest, follow what people say about your company, keep an eye on your competitors, stay on top of market trends, etc.

How can you find the time to do all of this, especially in the case of small businesses or individual micro-entrepreneurs?

Fortunately, there are tools, such as Google Alerts, that help with this task! The Google service sends emails to users whenever a registered term result is found.

Would you like to know more about how this tool works and how to use it in your digital marketing strategy? Then keep reading this article and we’ll tell you!

What is Google Alerts and what is it for?

Google Alerts is a service that monitors content related to a keyword or term defined by the user.

This content includes web pages, news, blog posts, and videos, among others. Thus, whenever the term is mentioned on the web, the user will receive an email alert.

This tool, which was released in 2003, is widely used by press offices and advertising agencies to track client and brand mentions in the press.

But, marketing professionals immediately saw the service’s potential within a digital marketing strategy.

Google Alerts helps you keep an eye on everything that is being said about a certain brand or product, in addition to allowing you to track mentions about your competitors and even provide ideas for content and rich material topics.

But how does the feature work in practice? 

It’s quite simple. When you access the platform, you can choose a term to be tracked by the service, such as “Hotmart”, for example.

So, whenever news, a blog post, video or any other type of content containing this term is posted, you will receive an email notification.

In other words, Google Alerts is a very useful resource for professionals who need to keep an eye on the main market trends.

Creating an alert in Google Alerts

Creating an alert in the service is quite easy. The first step is to go to the service’s page (https://www.google.com/alerts) and login with your Google account. You’ll see a screen similar to the one below:

The home page presents a few options. The first one, My alerts, allows you to edit or delete the alerts you have created, setting the time and frequency at which you want to receive the email notifications, search sources, the result page’s language and the region.

By clicking on the gear icon, you can choose whether you will always receive the alerts at a specific time or in a single message, and with a scheduled frequency by means of the “Digest” option.

In Me on the Web, you can create an alert with your own name or e-mail address registered in the service.

Thus, whenever any web content mentions you or your email address, Google Alerts will automatically send you a notification.

Finally, Alert Suggestions presents a few tips about companies, movies and trending topics. If you are interested in any of them, just click the “+” to create an alert.

In order to create a new alert, just enter the desired keyword or term in the search field at the top of the screen.

If you want results that are more accurate, enter the term within quotation marks, as in the Google advanced search.

To set up your alert, just click “Show options”. You’ll have access to the following preferences:

• Frequency: Allows you to choose the frequency with which you wish to receive your alerts (when available, once a day or once a week)

• Sources: Here, you can define which search sources will be used in the alerts, such as news, blogs, web, videos, books, discussions, financial or automatic

• Language: The language in which the content was posted

• Region: The country in which the content was posted

• How many: Allows you to choose to receive all the results or only the top content
• Send to: Define the email address that will receive the content.

After customizing all the options, just click “Create alert”.

Using Google Alerts in your sales strategy

Now you know how it works and what Google Alerts is used for.

But how do you use this feature in your marketing and sales strategies and take advantage of its features?

Below, we’ll show you a few applications of Google Alerts and how they can help your business sell more.

1. Monitor what the public is saying about your brand

One of Google Alerts most important features is the possibility of setting alarms with your brand name, your website’s URL or the name of your products and services.

This way, you can stay on top of everything that your customers are saying about your business, both good and bad.

This feature allows you to anticipate crises and respond quickly to possible complaints. This way, you can preserve your business’ reputation and solve your customers’ problems. 

And that’s not all. These comments and mentions also work as valuable insights on points where the company can improve.

2. Ideas for content and rich materials

Another very useful application of Google Alerts is the discovery of references and ideas for creating content, whether they are blog posts, ebooks, videos or podcasts.

Through the tool’s alerts, you can find out what people are saying about a certain topic in forums, blogs and news websites.

One great strategy is to create alerts with foreign sources. When you identify that a topic is trending abroad, you can import this idea and create content related to it.

This way, your brand will be the first to talk about the subject. 

3. Identify link-building opportunities

The number of backlinks is one of Google’s main ranking factors. Therefore, generating links with mentions to your brand is an SEO strategy that you must apply to your business.

To do so, just create an alert with your company’s name. When you receive an alert, check if the mention has a link to your website. If not, contact the person responsible for the content and ask that the link be included.

You’ll see how much easier it’ll be to find opportunities for link building and strengthen your brand.

4. Analyze your competitors

Nowadays, taking care of your own brand isn’t enough. In order to gain prominence in the online market, keeping an eye on your competitors is very important, and Google Alerts is a major ally in this task.

By creating an alert with a competitor’s brand name or product, you’ll be able to monitor everything being posted, in addition to knowing what the public is saying about them.

This tactic is great for understanding how other companies attract the public’s attention and the strategies that ensure the best results.

5. Attract more visitors to your brand’s channels

The biggest goal for those who start applying a digital marketing strategy is to generate more visitors to a blog or views for a video. And of course, converting these visitors into customers!

The best way of doing this is by posting content that attracts the users’ attention and that answers their questions and solves their problems.

And with Google Alerts, you’re able to track, in real time, which topics your audience has been searching the most and offer content that answers those needs.

The more relevant and popular the topics addressed are, the easier it will be to attract users to your channels.

So, make sure to put the tips in this post into practice and start using Google Alerts in your marketing strategy.

And if you’d like to learn about other ways to attract users to your website, make sure you read our post with 7 tips on how to generate organic traffic with content marketing.