USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

Having a quick and easy solution to monitoring your brand is important to your brand’s success. There are many ways for you to monitor your brand with help from Google Alerts. You can have Google email you whenever certain key phrases are mentioned; depending on the total number of alerts you have set up, you can bulk them all together or set up different times to receive certain alerts throughout the day. Whether you choose to monitor your brand name or your competition’s, both can be valuable.

Learning From Your Competition

Keeping an eye on your competition can help you understand consumers online. Learn what your competition is doing and what users are searching for, and then you can use that knowledge to improve upon your competition’s strategies and gain more traffic to your website. You can continue to refine your strategies by monitoring user response.

You can also use Google Alerts is to report links that are pointing to your competition. If a site is willing to link to your competitor, they might be willing to link to you, too! Also think about linking to others in your field or industry to get their attention, and do not forget to link to yourself as well.

Where and When Google is Finding You

Google Alerts allows you to see where and when Google has found you. Learn where Google is finding your name, business name, and website, and you’ll see which key words and key phrases are being used and how often. Google Alerts can provide you with up the minute information on all of this, if you choose. You can also receive information on the timeframe that your website and key words where searched for.

Keeping Hackers Out

Setting up Google Alerts for specific conditions can help you keep one-step ahead of hackers. You’ll know instantly when someone has hacked the server or unapproved content has been published if you set it up to monitor certain words in connection with your brand or site. Without these alerts, you may not immediately realize you’ve been hacked. Obviously, this could harm your rankings, and the longer it remains untended the longer it will take to fix. Set up different alerts if you have to, but make sure that your website is secure at all times.

Wrapping Up

Having as much security and knowledge about your website and brand as possible is key to success, and using Google Alerts can only help in that. Knowing about your competition’s success and tactics can help you build your brand if you know how to use the information. Keeping up to date on where your website and brand are being mentioned will help you gain the information you need to improve on your rankings. In short, setting up Google Alerts can help you not only keep track of your brand’s success, but improve upon it.

Real-time searching. Many claim to offer it, few actually do. The leader of real-time search so far would have to be Twitter. Many celebrities take part in tweeting, companies do so, and it’s mentioned as a major part SEM from many speakers if you have ever attended a Wordcamp convention. But what is real-time searching exactly? Just as importantly, what isn’t it?

As stated by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land, blogging is not one of those things that can be considered real-time searching. This is due, he says, to the amount of time that is taken from its conception to it’s publication. Which could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days depending on the amount of research put into said post. Hardly anything close to what one would consider “real-time”.

So what is real-time searching? Tweeting, of course, is as good as it gets as far as we’ve come technologically. But you can’t exactly search for it on Google and expect to see your best friend eating a peanut butter cookie. One; because it’s just not first page material. Two; because Google is currently unable to index the lot of the tweets that occur on Twitter. The only one capable of doing so thus far is, of course, Twitter itself.

So what is the advantage of real-time searching in comparison to regular search engines? Maybe you want a broad subject in a field such as…lets say computer components. Try that on a real search engine and you would undoubtedly get companies trying to sell you their products, not about any advancements made. The results you find may even be dated a month old or longer. Real-time searching in comparison would give better results in terms of if a company was planning to release a better video card, or was designing a higher-end motherboard. Sure, you are bound to see some mundane results like “lol Hey, I picked up a new 8GB USB. Ted owes me a dollar.”, but this is the internet we’re talking about, random stuff happens.

In my opinion, if Twitter and Facebook were to do a joint effort, the result could only be beaten by computers hooked up to our brains. Tweeting our thoughts in true real time.

The video below is Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, discussing real-time search and his company.