Google Alerts have been available for quite some time now. Most people use Google Alerts to track news and articles related to their industry of work.
There are, however, more beneficial uses for Google Alerts in regards to tracking your brand image and even your personal image on the web.
If you’re an entrepreneur or just an avid web user, why not set up a Google Alert for your name?
This suggestion was brought to my attention a month or two ago when reading a blog that I honestly don’t remember the name of.
After reading the article, I set up a Google Alert for my name and my website. Obviously, Anson Alexander isn’t a very common name so I don’t get spammed with too many false alarms. I did, however, receive some alerts when my name was mentioned on Google+. It was an instance where the user did not actually @mention me so if I hadn’t set up an alert, I would never have know about the post containing my name.
It has also been very useful for discovering “no-follow” links to my site. If someone mentions AnsonAlex.com in a post but does not provide a “do-follow” link, I would never know about it. Thanks to Google Alerts, I a now notified within 24 hours.
Setting up a Google Alert for your website is also very useful because you don’t have to manually check to see if your post is indexed by Google. I used to manually search Google to make sure my newest posts were indexed properly but now I get a Google Alert with my new post within 24 hours of posting.
Using Google Alerts to monitor your name, brand or website is very helpful in controlling and monitoring what is said about you online.
If anybody else has some valuable uses for Google Alerts, I would love to hear about them in the comments section below!
