For those of you who missed it, last week I published a post called ‘The Ninjas Guide To Google Alerts’ over at SearchEngineJournal.com.
SEJ is one of the biggest digital marketing blogs and is in the top 5k sites according to Alexa. The guest post got exposure to over 600,000 monthly unique visitors as well promotion to 22K Twitter followers and 29K Facebook fans.
At the time of writing the post has been shared over 500 times and has 42 comments. The most popular post on SEJ in July only had 247 shares and 1 comment so its good to see that the post has been well received by the SEJ community in comparison.
The Ninjas Guide To Google Alerts
In my opinion Google Alerts is the most powerful tool any online marketer has available to them. However it is also one of the most under utilised tools out there.
All Google Alerts does is notify of new results via e-mail or RSS based on the search queries you enter.
That might sound a bit simple but it is a seriously powerful way of leverage brand, authority, traffic and sales. If you have overlooked Google Alerts in the past it’s time to sit up and pay attention.
In my guest post I share all the Alerts I use personally, including the ones I use to promote this blog and cover the following topics-
- Monitoring brand
- Monitoring competitors
- Monitoring questions in your niche
- Monitoring content distribution
- Finding new guest post opportunities
- Monitoring link building footprints
- Monitoring site security
- Monitoring shoppers
- Regional based monitoring
- Discovering new niches
- How to setup Google Alerts
Click Here To Read The Full Post
BONUS TIP!
SEJ reader Kaushal Shah (from couponcodehut.com) left a comment on the guest post that has to be one of the most ingenious ways to use Google Alerts I have seen. Full credit for the below goes to Kaushal.
Measuring Content Quality
When setting up a Google Alert you are given two choices. You can choose to receive Only the best results or All results for your given query.
Essentially Google Alerts gives you a ‘high quality content only’ filter and you can use this filter to measure the quality of the content in Google’s Eyes for your own site.
Kaushal setup 2 alerts for his domain like this
site:yourdomain.com
One of the Alerts is setup to deliver Only the best results and the other Alert is setup to deliver All results.
The theory is that when he publishes a post, if it gets delivered by the Only the best results Alert he has setup then Google must consider the post as high quality content.
How clever is that?
The Sky Is The Limit
The sky really is the limit when it comes to Google Alerts. If you can search for it, you can monitor it. If you get creative with your Alerts there are no end of possibilities!
How Will You Use Google Alerts?
I would love to know how you use Google Alerts in your online marketing efforts. Do you have a unique way of using it that I haven’t mentioned?
If you don’t currently use Google Alerts, how will you use it?
No not Matt Cutts, but I am better at SEO than him :P I make a great living online with SEO and I will teach you 
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12 Responses
Nice work Matthew. I hadn't read the post on SEJ, so thanks for the heads up, hope the traffic/subscribers get a big boost for you (by the way he's taken the link to your site out of the main article, but left an extra '>').
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
September 10th, 2012 at 11:39 am
To be honest it didn't generate that much traffic at all but I will be doing a follow up post comparing the guest post results to having the first comment on a popular article.
Yeah I noticed that and sent it over to the editor, just waiting for it to be updated.
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every day I open the blog to see whether any new article or content but no luck nowadays
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
September 19th, 2012 at 4:43 pm
Hi Alson,
I've been working hard on the background/preperation work for some new posts/case studys. for example high pr aged domain vs new domain, ranking a site with just blog network posts and so forth
Also I got invited to do Terry Kyles Sunday SEO last minute last week which delay the video for the week.
The last video in the tiered link building series will be done before Sunday
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How were you able to setup multiple alerts for one term. ie the site:domain when I try to do it in G iam being told the term is already in.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
October 14th, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Use a different account ^^
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Hi Matthew – just spent an eye-opening (not to mention wallet-oeforepening !) 90 minutes looking through some of your posts and comments… Why have I not found out about you before ! Wonderful stuff – thank you !
My problem is this – I know that Google Alerts are enormously powerful – and FREE ! – and I intended to use them to drive the RSS feeds for a new WP plugin to semi-autoblog a new site… However, the alert feed from Google is not actually an RSS feed ! What I mean is, for example, if you extract news articles using G.A. the post title can be unintelligible (strange character strings can appear if there are special characters in the original item (like double quotes) ) and if (it doesn’t always ! ) it extracts an image, it only forwards a thumbnail version.
So – to cut to the chase – do you know of any available software that can convert a Google alert into a “proper” RSS feed item ? The WP plugin sellers really don’t seem to want to help me with this !
I would be very (eternally ?) grateful for any help !
Roger
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
March 27th, 2013 at 11:27 am
Hi Roger,
Hahaha that made me laugh thanks for the comment =D
To be honest I’m not really sure how you could resolve that – perhaps a custom script that takes the source data and scrubs non standard character strings and outputs a new rss feed?
Probably cost $20-$30 to get coded on odesk?
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Only three comments on this post haha.
I just put up a quick post about using G alerts to monitor spam indexation. Backlink for you sir.
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
March 27th, 2013 at 11:05 am
Got a lot more interest at SEJ =\
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Matthew you are such a hero lol…you assured me that it is possible to be a good blogger and make a living out of it ….. your tips are such inspirational
Thank you
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Matthew Woodward Reply:
May 15th, 2013 at 9:05 am
I’m just giving people what they want
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