How to use Google Alerts
With Google Alerts, you can receive real-time information about a particular product or brand based on the search term you entered. It is also good to determine the type of result in order to later analyze where the brand name in sites, blogs or forums.
What are Google Alerts?
Google alerts is a tool that monitors Google search results in different categories. The main task of Google Alerts is to inform you by email when new information matching your search term is found.
How does Google Alerts work?
Using the form on the Google Alerts site, you enter the keyword you are interested in, just like when you use the Google search engine. The tool needs some additional information in order to specify the emails it sends.
- Enter the keywords of your search.
- Determine the frequency of sending (daily, weekly or immediately, i.e. whenever an event occurs).
- Choose the type of results you are looking for: News, Blogs, Video, Books, Discussions, Finance.
- Search language;
- Search region;
- Indicate the number of results (the best or all results)
- Finally, select the mode of sending (by email by indicating your email address or via a rss feed reader.
- Validate your alert by clicking on the “create alert” button.
Use quotation marks to search for exact expressions. We advise you to use this technique.
” ” (quotation marks) : exact search of the indicated sentence. Example: “my brand name”. Google Alerts will search for search terms that match those contained within the quotes.
– (minus): placing a minus before a keyword will exclude it from searches. Example: brand name -video. Google Alerts searches for all keywords related to the company name, excluding the expression video.
site:monsite.com Checks the content within the given domain. Example: site:mycurrent.com – alerts will be issued when new content with the company name appears on mycurrent.com.
The alert, if you wish, can be deleted or modified at will. As soon as you have not enough results or too many (infobesity).
Disadvantages of Google Alerts
The problem with Google Alerts is the lack of completeness on some sites, when the site of a competitor is not updated enough, the Google crawler will take time to find the new pages put online (see the crawl budget).
While the pages are present on the site of your competitor.
Second problem, are indexing problems found in 2020 and 2021
If you are alert on large sites often updated the Google Alerts tool seems fine, otherwise go to our solution!