Google Alerts are an important tool for any startup. With thoughtful alerts, you can conveniently monitor conversations, press articles, and competitive developments taking place in realtime throughout your market.
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Google Alerts are simply regular Google searches that occur several times a day and notify you when new or updated webpages are found which hit the search terms you select. To avoid information inundation, you’ll want to use the boolean “AND” and “OR” operators appropriately so that the alerts strike a good balance of broad coverage without excessive useless information. The “site:” Google search tag is also very helpful in targeting particular sites.
We have found that Google Alerts do not actually find everything on the internet related to the search terms we provide. But they do a good job at capturing information that would otherwise not be on my radar. We find that Bing Alerts also do a good job at finding information sometimes missed by Google.
Other options we use for monitoring our market include: 1) subscribing to RSS feeds of blogs, forums, and news sources in our market, and 2) monitoring Twitter conversations separately with dedicated focus.
How do you use Google Alerts in your business? How do you monitor your market?
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