Google alerts can be a great tool for link building. The best part: It’s free of course.
Apart from being free, Google alers has 3 other main advantages: The first one, is the amount of data available -basically all the pages Google crawls-. The second one, is that it doesn’t require a lot of time to maintain, you set it up (maybe you can change the configuration after some time) and wait for the results, and finally, the fact that you get fresh results, meaning that you get higher chances to get an answer back.
Setting up Google Alerts
Basically you would like Google to notify you each time something related to a particular search term (or monitor the web for new content – as they state)
The recommended setting of Google Alerts for better link building, would be to set up the notifications to arrive to your inbox once a week to avoid spam
Selecting relevant queries
The next thing that needs to be configured is what type of queries you’d like to be notified about. Most of the queries would fall in one of the following categories:
- - Questions and answers
- - Brand mentions
- - Competitors mentions
Questions and answers queries
Some example of queries to gather questions that are being asked by the people are:
- - “I need a [product]”
- - “what [product] do I need”
- - “what is a good [product]”
- - “what is the cheapest [product]”
- - “where should I buy a/an [product]”
- - “where can I get a good [product]”
With this notifications, you will get fresh results from questions relevant to your product/service/website, etc.
Brand mentions
- - “Brand name”
- - Domain name
- - Domain name misspellings
This type of results have a huge potential for getting links. This is an easy chance to get a link from another site that mentions your brand, but might not be linking to your site.
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