7 Ways to Use Google Alerts for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Google Alerts has become synonymous with reputation management. Many businesses use it to monitor and manage their respective reputations. Available at google.com/alerts, Google Alerts is essentially a notification service. Business owners can set up notification-based alerts for their brand names. When websites talk about their brand names, business owners will receive a notification from Google.

You can also use Google Alerts for search engine optimization (SEO). It’s not touted as an SEO tool, but Google Alerts supports many SEO-related processes. Here are seven ways to use Google Alerts for SEO.

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1. Find Guest Blogging Opportunities

For more guest blogging opportunities, you should consider using Google Alerts. It can reveal relevant blogs that accept guest posts. In addition, you can link to your website when you submit a guest post. All of these organic, one-way links can boost your website’s rankings.

To find guest blogging opportunities, set up alerts for search queries consisting of a relevant keyword, followed by a guest blogging footprint. A guest blogging footprint is simply a phrase or sentence commonly found on blogs that accept guest posts. For example, “Write for us” and “guest blogging guidelines” are footprints. You can set up alerts that include a relevant keyword and a guest blogging footprint — wrap the footprint in quotation marks — to find more guest blogging opportunities.

2. Track Content Indexing

You can use Google Alerts to track content indexing. Google typically won’t index your website’s content immediately. It may take several days or weeks for the search engine’s algorithm to index a new page of content. Pages won’t generate any search traffic from Google until its algorithm has indexed them.

With Google Alerts, you’ll know when Google indexes your website’s content. Set up alerts for the page’s URLs prefixed with the “site” operator, such as “site:example.com/new-page.” When Google indexes the page, it will send you a notification. If you haven’t received a notification after two weeks, check the page to ensure that you aren’t blocking Google from accessing it.

3. Find Unlinked Mentions

In addition to guest blogging opportunities, you can use Google Alerts to find unlinked mentions. An unlinked mention is a text passage in which an external website talks about your site without linking. While they have little or no impact on search rankings, you may be able to convert them into backlinks, which has a substantial effect on search rankings.

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Set up alerts for your website’s domain names to find unlinked mentions. Most unlinked mentions consist of domain names. An external website will probably use anchor text if it wants to link to your site. If an external website only wants to discuss your site, it will probably mention the domain name.

Email the webmasters who created the unlinked mentions to see if they are willing to link to your website. Don’t offer them cash or other forms of compensation. Instead, tell the webmasters that you believe your website would be useful to their audiences and ask them if they would link to it.

4. Spy on Competitors

You can eavesdrop on your competitors’ websites by using Google Alerts. SEO is competitive. You must show Google that your website is better than your competitors. Spying on your competitors will help you overcome them.

To spy on your competitors, set up alerts for your competitors’ domains with the “site” operator. Any new content published on your competitors’ websites will trigger an alert. You can then visit your competitors’ websites to view their new content. By spying on your competitors, you’ll better understand their strengths and weaknesses.

You can also use Google Alerts to identify trending topics. Fresh content encourages higher rankings. You may struggle to create fresh content if you run out of ideas. Google Alerts can reveal trending, relevant topics that you can cover on your website.

To identify trending topics, set up alerts for relevant short-tail keywords. The keywords should be no longer than two or three words, and they should be relevant to the content currently published on your website. Then, as external websites publish similar types of content, you’ll receive notifications for them.

6. Quickly Respond to Customer Reviews

With Google Alerts, you can respond to customer reviews more quickly. Customer reviews can affect search rankings. They are one of the top signals for local rankings. Quickly responding to customer reviews can increase customer retention while encouraging other customers to leave their reviews.

Google Alerts can reveal new customer reviews. You won’t be able to respond to a customer review unless you know about it. Many customer reviews are published on third-party websites that go unnoticed by businesses. Set up alerts for your website’s domain name and brand name to identify customer reviews. Adding the word “review” to these alerts may further refine the notifications, including mostly customer reviews.

Whether a customer review is positive or negative, you should respond to it. Responding to all customer reviews is good for SEO. It allows you to address problems encountered by customers so that they continue to buy your business’s products or services. And with a higher customer retention rate, more customers will interact with your website.

7. Protect Against Content Plagiarism

If you’re worried about other websites plagiarizing your site’s content, Google Alerts can help. You can use the notification service to protect against content plagiarism. However, Google Alerts won’t stop other websites from plagiarizing your site’s content; it will only reveal instances in which plagiarism has occurred. It would help if you took action to remove the plagiarised content from the external websites.

To protect against content plagiarism, set up an alert for each new page. When you publish a new content page, take a word-for-word excerpt from it for an alert. The alert should consist entirely of a moderately long excerpt wrapped in quotation marks. If another website publishes this same excerpt, you’ll receive a notification from Google.

Google Alerts is a valuable SEO tool. You can use it to find guest blogging opportunities, track content indexing, find unlinked mentions, spy on your competitors, identify trending topics, quickly respond to customer reviews and protect against content plagiarism.

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Last Updated in 2022-12-28T09:06:13+00:00 by Lukasz Zelezny

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