How to use Google Alerts for your business, some tips and tricks to grow your business using this tool.

2. What is Google Alerts?
Google Alerts is a free monitoring functionality
from Google which sends the users an email every
time new content is published on the internet
regarding the keywords set up.

3. Why Google Alerts?
• The main value that Google Alerts gives for business is the
opportunity to monitor the internet live and get results of
the latest contents published. It might help your company
to locate new competitors, facts about the sector and local
news that may affect your business.
• By setting up Google Alerts you will get the you need
instantly, which gives your company an advantage within
your competitors, letting you know statistics about your
company (i.e. negative comments) and give a response
ASAP which increases the chances to get it right.

4. How to use Google Alerts?
• It is really easy Google Alerts. The user just has to access
Google Alerts and set up the search query, the kind of
results you want to get (news, blogs, videos, etc) and how
often you want to get the results. Also, you might have to
set up an email account where you will receive the alerts.

5. How to choose the keywords?
• There are lots of search terms which we will be likely to be
monitoring, but to choose the right ones will give us the
chance to get the best results without a hundred of useless
emails.

6. Some ideas
• Company name: this one is mandatory. If your name is
formed of more than a word, it might be used
• Sector + Location: It will helps the company to locate
different issues such as events, laws or anything
regarding the sector, including new competitors (i.e
social media, Birmingham)
• Competitors: See which content is being published
about our competitors will help us to see good and bad
practices.

7. Tips to choose the words
• Don’t be so general regarding the search terms otherwise
you will receive lots of results which might become
spammer.
• Select the right email frequency: Usually once a day is
enough for searches with more than two results on average
a day. For searches with less content frequency, setting it
up just when content happens will be OK and won’t
became spam.

8. How the results are shown?
• Google Alerts will send you and email to the chosen email
address with a really simple format similar to the results on
the search engine: Title, summary and link, with the
keywords in bold.
• These emails are usually sent in the morning (between 8am
and 10am) so set up an account that you will be able to
access by this time (usually in your smartphone).