How to Set up Google Alerts (and Use It to Grow Your Business)

Do you want to monitor the web for mentions of your name? Or perhaps your business? Or maybe even your competitor? Google Alerts can do this.

It’s simple to use. You enter a word or phrase, and you’ll be alerted by email whenever Google finds new mentions on the web.

Here’s what that email may look like:

joshua hardwick google alert

a Google Alerts email for my name

But Google Alerts is useful for more than just boosting your ego. Tracking mentions related to your business or brand can unveil opportunities for link building, brand building, collaborations, and more.

It’s a free tool that’s well-suited to beginners. But, despite being owned by Google, it doesn’t catch all web mentions.

How do we know? Because we have a web monitoring tool called Ahrefs Alerts. When we ran a small experiment to compare the number of results found by each tool, we found that, on average, Ahrefs Alerts returned 2,376% more results.

You can read more about this experiment at the end of this post.

But for now, let’s get back to what you came here telemarketing list for—setting up Google Alerts and using it to grow your business!

How to set up Google Alerts

Go to google.com/alerts

Enter a search term to track. Google Alerts will display a results preview as you type.

Select “Show options” (below the search box). Choose how often you’d like to receive alerts: once a day; as it happens; once a week.

Choose a source for your alerts: web; blogs; news; etc. If you’re unsure, leave this as the default “automatic.”

Choose a language and region.

Choose how many results you want to see: “all results,” or “only the best results.”

Choose a delivery email address (this is where Google will send your alerts).

Select “Create alert.”

Here’s an example Google Alert that tracks mentions of my name on the web:

google alerts name

Simple, right?

Now let’s go over a few actionable ways to use Google Alerts.

1. Monitor for unlinked mentions of your brand, then pursue them

People will sometimes mention your brand telemarketing list

without linking back to you.

Here’s an unlinked mention for Ahrefs:

unlinked mention ahrefs

This matters for two reasons:

Links help you to rank in Google, so you want as many high-quality links as possible if you care about SEO (which you should!);telemarketing list

Links help people to navigate the web, meaning that unlinked mentions make it harder for readers to reach your site. Should they wish to know more about your business, they will probably have to resort to Googling you. Most people won’t bother to do this.

With unlinked mentions, you’re already halfway there. The author already knows who you are, and it will often only take a small push to convert this mention to a link.

But first, you need to find unlinked mentions, which you can do with Google Alerts.

Just set up Google alerts for any brand-related terms. You will then get an email when Google finds new brand mentions on the web.

Here’s a Google Alert that monitors for mentions of our brand: Ahrefs.