How To Use Google Alerts to Build Your Brand Awareness

Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service, offered by the search engine company Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user's search term.

I use Google Alerts to monitor the news related to my industry, my brand and for my clients and their industries and brands, find journalists that may not be on my radar and kind of use them to guide my pitches to keep them timely and relevant.

How To Setup Google Alerts: 

• Go to Google Alerts.

• In the box at the top, enter a topic you want to follow.

• To change your settings, click Show options. You can change:

  • How often you get notifications

  • The types of sites you’ll see

  • Your language

  • The part of the world you want info from

  • How many results you want to see

  • What accounts get the alert

• Click Create Alert. You’ll get emails whenever we find matching search results.

What Alerts to Follow:

• Your Niche - EXAMPLE: Fashion (fashion designer, fashion stylist, stylist, black designers, fashionpreneur etc)

• Your Location - Where are you located? City & State

• Your Competitors - You’ll want to know what the industry is saying about them

• Your Industry - EXAMPLE: (Fashion Week, New York Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week, MAGIC Conference)

Tips to Keep In Mind:

• Make sure you use quotation marks around your alerts - This will help with keeping your searches only 

• Plug your name

• Frequency - As they come in , daily, weekly etc

Now That You Have These Alerts - What Do You Do?

• Find and connect with journalists in your niche. Now Im not saying to go out and pitch them your story right away but find them on the socials, connect with them through email and just send a little note to let them know that you are available and a short blurb on what you do. And they may even add you to the list of people to follow up with when they need quotes or have an assignment. Add them to your media lists for further use add notes as needed such as their assignments, links to their articles and job changes- because these things happen very frequently. 

• Keep up with what your competitors are doing. See who is who and who is being written about. Not as a monkey see monkey do but use that for inspiration for your content.

• You can use these alerts to stay on top of trends in your industry.

Be up to date on current events so you dont miss the latest news that you can blog about, create content around and share in a newsletter to your tribe.

If you have any additional questions, be sure to put them in the comments!