How to Set up Google Alerts – The Step by Step Guide

You want to monitor your online mentions with Google Alerts? Want to know how to set up Google Alerts? Then you’re in the right spot. We’ve elaborated the steps you need to take to create alerts and get all the important mentions in your inbox.

You need to keep up and up-to-date all the mentions that are related to your brand and your interests. Find out how Google Alerts can search the internet to give you those mentions following these operations:

1. How to Set up Google Alerts
2. How Google Alerts Helps 
3. Effective Google Alerts Alternative: Brand Mentions 

1. How to Set up Google Alerts

There’s nothing hardcore here. These are the steps to set up alerts:

1. Log in one of your Gmail accounts. You have two options if you log into your Google account: either choose an associated Gmail address or RSS.
2. Go to google.com/alerts.
3. Search for the term you want to track. It can be a brand name - yours or one of your competitors, a product name (known by many people), an industry, your name, a movie name and so on.
4. Click on “Show options” and select how often would you like to receive email notifications, the sources, language, region and city, frequency. After that, you can click on Create Alert. (printscreen 1)
5. Click on the ⚙️ Settings icon to customize Google Alerts and choose when to receive alerts and the format type, all results or only the best results. (printscreen 2)
6. Wait to receive Google alerts in your inbox.

After you create your alerts, you’ll see them in a list, where you can review, edit and delete them. You can create lots of other alerts and see all of them here.

Preview the list of mentions that match your options directly in your account. Based on how often you opted to receive notifications, Google will send you a list of mentions on your Gmail account.

2. How Google Alerts Helps 

Google Alerts sends you email notifications and can be used for media monitoring. As you grow your business, it can be harder and harder to monitor the web for your brand and all the linked and unlinked mentions about your overall business.

Google alerts help you to:

• Keep up with your niche and industry.
• Get honest feedback from your audience and find out what they say about you.
• Spy on your competitors and find their weak spots.
• Build a community and respond to your audience’s questions.
• Explore new blog post ideas.
• Find new link building opportunities.

3. Effective Google Alerts Alternative: Brand Mentions 

Google Alerts is a genius invention that helps marketers control online chaos. Still, like many genius things, it gets outdated. The tool is facing two big problems:

• not being able to find all the relevant mentions
• not sending Google Alerts emails anymore

An effective monitoring tool alternative is Brand Mentions. It works on the same principle and it reports much more mentions, more relevancy and more accuracy than Google Alerts. The web monitoring tool is fine-tuned to help you track your brand online, build your online reputation, track relevant content by excluding results from the pile.

You have lots of options to monitor the web and build up a strong digital marketing strategy:

• Quality filters. Be in total control of what mentions to see in your account. The tool offers better keyword monitoring management to fine-tune everything you’re monitoring.

• Real-time monitoring. Get instant mentions in your inbox.

• Large database & extra mention sources. BrandMentions offers you a variety of sources collecting data you can choose from, depending on your markets, audiences, buying trends, and so on.

• Historical data. Better business insights come with more data. See data for up to 1 year in the past.

• Exclude or include terms for better accuracy. You have the possibility to exclude specific social profiles, too.

• Online reputation monitoring. Find out what do people think about you (be it clients, competitors, influencers and so on). BrandMentions sets up some rules using the algorithm to analyze the mentions. The Sentiment Analysis feature detects the emotions people have.

• Better creation and editing of the projects and better and faster overall mention crawling.

Conclusion

Google Alerts can be a great solution if you want something very simple and a few mentions to start your business. On the other hand, Brand Mentions can be a more effective alternative option to set up alerts, get real-time mentions, analyze sentiment analysis, perform web monitoring and find relevant content.