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January 2, 2014

Do you know about Google Alerts as a marketing & SEO tool?

One of the important ways one can increase their web site’s search ranking is to deliver relevant content to Google and Bing.

Another important way is to increase the number of key-worded links pointing to your web site, aka link building. There is a pro-penguin way to do this, so be careful to learn how before you dive in.

Google Alerts can help you mine for relevant content to write about as well as find sites that make sense for you to put a key-worded link on. Of course not every site you put a key-worded link on will be a follow link passing juice back to your site. In the event that the link you post is a no follow link, there’s still possible benefits like increased traffic to your web site. Start by going to www.google.com/alerts and entering a search query you think is relevant to your target audience.

Google will show you a sample of the matches it found for the day you searched right there on the screen. If no matches were found, a sample of the type of matches will be displayed. You can quickly see how this tool can help you find new content you can use to share with your target audience, or perhaps take a position, or use to start a dialog. Now that you see a sample, you can set the preferences and activate your alert.


For example, let’s say you’re company makes organic dark chocolate bars. You could set up an alert for any news on “chocolate is bad for your health” and potentially find discussions where you could respectfully interject your opinion that when used moderately, pure organic dark chocolate has been proven to improve cardiovascular health and blood flow to the brain of people with baseline impairments.

This is an excellent opportunity to position yourself as a trusted expert by providing useful and relevant content about your product to your audience.

Another way you can use Google Alerts is by finding new ways to reach your audience. For example, let’s say you developed a home based teaching method for parent's of children on the Autism Spectrum. These training videos give parents tools they can use to teach their children social and physical skills, in order to participate more in everyday activities.

You could set up an Alert using the keywords “activities for autistic children." The results you’ll receive could show you new sites you can research for link building opportunities. You might find discussions where you can help others by pointing them to your product, if it makes sense to do so. Be careful here, going around to forums and posting links to your site where the topic isn't relevant to your product or service isn't helpful and worse, is a bit annoying.

Another benefit is learning about some latest research you could write a blog article about, sharing knowledge and helping your network stay current with latest trends and information.

Using Google Alerts is a fast way to mine for ways to improve your site’s PageRank, find new content to write about, drive traffic back to your web site, and more.


Do you have an opinion or question on this? Please leave us your comment below.

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