As the internet continues to grow, it gets harder and harder to efficiently find new and relevant information. Luckily for us, Google saw this coming and developed a tool to help keep us informed - Google Alerts, a monitoring system for Google search results that periodically emails you when new content appears.

Lately, I’d been hearing a lot of talk about the Alerts service, but couldn’t quite grasp how they worked or why they’d even be that useful to me. Now that I’ve had the chance to play around with them, I’d like to share a few of their more practical applications with you. This guide will explain how to set up and monitor your Google Alerts, as well as show you how to deliver specific and relevant information right to your inbox.

What are Google Alerts?

Straight from the Google Alerts home page:

In addition to the above uses, there are a number of other interesting applications for Google Alerts in the business world. Next, we’ll be discussing how to set up and manage your alerts. If you are already familiar alert management, I’d suggest skipping ahead to the Practical Implementations section.

What sources are monitored?

Google allows you to keep track of six different sources of information, each with its own criteria for sending alerts:

• News, Blogs and Video – The latest Google results matching your query that appear within the top 10 news, blog, or video results.
• Web - The latest Google results matching your query that appear within the top 20 web search results.
• Groups - The latest Google results matching your query that appear within the top 50 Google Group search results.
• Comprehensive – The latest results from Blog, Web & News for your query - condensed into a single email.

Creating and managing Alerts

Although it is possible to create Google Alerts without a free Google account, it’s advisable that you use one as it will allow you to more easily manage multiple alerts. For the sake of this guide, we’ll assume that you’ve got a Google account and are already logged in.

Creating an Alert

Creating a new Alert begins with navigating to the Google Alerts home page.

From there, you’ll be able to determine the topic you’d like to monitor and type of alerts that you’d like to receive.

A brief description of each of the options follows:

• Search terms - This field indicates what Google will search for. You may enter individual words or entire phrases, and can include any operators already available in advanced Google searches.

  A Few Examples

  • Detroit Lions – Standard Google Search for the term Detroit and the term Lions
  • “Detroit Lions” – Will search Google for the entire phrase “Detroit Lions”
  • site:www.detroitlions.com – Would tell you whenever Google indexes a new page on the Detroit Lions website
• Type – You can choose which Google sources to receive alerts from. These include the six options described above: News, Blog, Web, Video, Groups and Comprehensive.
• How often – Determines how frequently you’ll receive email alerts. Options include: as-it-happens, once a day, and once a week.
• Deliver to – If you are logged into your Google account, this field will be pre-populated with your email address. Otherwise, you can specify the email address of your choice.

Once you click the “Create Alert” button, you’re Alert will be saved and you’ll be taken to your Alerts dashboard where you can manage all of your active alerts.

Managing Your Alerts

Editing and deleting your alerts is dirt simple with the Google Alert dashboard. If you want to remove alerts, simply check the boxes next to the ones you want to remove and click the delete button at the bottom of the page.

If you want to edit an alert’s settings, just hit the edit button to the right of the corresponding alert.

Practical Implementations

So now that you know the basics of creating and managing Google Alerts, let’s look at some of the neat things you can do with them.

SEO Campaign Monitoring

Google Alerts can be used to track the progress of your link building campaigns and even track where competitors have been fishing for links.

Here are a few examples to consider:

• link:www.yourwebsite.com - Will show you new inbound links to your site that Google finds
• link:www.yourcompetitor.com - Will show you where your competitor is getting new inbound links
• site:www.yoursite.com - Will show you which new pages from your website are making it into Google’s index.

Let’s take a deeper look at what our results might look like in the first case - using link:www.metaspring.com, we can see a few of the most recent inbound links to our site that Google has picked up from some of the blogs we left comments on.

Brand / Reputation Monitoring

Alerts can also be useful for keeping an eye on your reputation. In the below example, I am looking for anything that shows up with my name in it. The alert below was sent out when when a press release of ours, in which I was mentioned, gained syndication on another site.

Seeking Out New Stories

Another handy use for Alerts is for finding new information to share in social media. For one of our clients, we maintain a Twitter account focusing on interior design and often use the results found in our Google Alerts to help us gather and share useful content.

Additional Resources

While Google Alerts shouldn’t be the only place you should go looking for new information, they certainly help to automate some of the time spent in research. We’ve outlined just a few of the ways that we use Google Alerts, but we’d love to know how you use them - feel free to share in the comments!

And if you’d like more information on Google Alerts, here are a few more good resources:

• Google Alerts Help
• Google Alerts: Get Email Updates On Specific Topics
• Using Google Alerts To Help Your Business
• 10 Uses of Google Alerts For A Freelancer
• How to Use Google Alerts to Monitor Your Company’s Online Presence