Google Alerts

Google Alerts (Google.co.uk/alerts) is a free monitoring platform that allows you to create alerts based around topics or keywords.

1. Monitor your brand – create alerts to see where your brand name or company is being mentioned across the web.

2. Monitor the competition – keep an eye on your competition and see where they are getting talked about.

3. Monitor topics related to your business – find out what people are talking about as it happens.

GETTING STARTED

Setting up an alert could not be easier.  Simply choose a keyword or phrase to monitor and adjust the search criteria – location, source (web, blogs, news), how often you want notifying and where the notification is sent to.  Now all you have to do is wait for the notifications.  A useful tool within the platform when setting up alerts is a preview pane showing you some recent results.  This allows you to refine your search criteria so you don’t get unnecessary notifications for irrelevant topics.

TOP TIP

Using inverted commas when setting your search topics defines the keywords as a phrase.  So New Gym would search for any references that have included the words New AND Gym, but using “New Gym” will only show results for when the two words were written next to each other as a phrase.