Stay Alert to Your Competition

Mary Bowling | 4 January 2006 |

Many businesses use Google and Yahoo Alerts to track what search engines see about enterprises and websites, as well as when they see it.

Yahoo will deliver news to you via e-mail, mobile devices or your desktop instant messenger, as they gather it. You may choose from preset topics, such as Travel Destinations and Blogs. There are currently 24 topics and Yahoo is quickly adding more. Check it out at http://alerts.yahoo.com.

Google Alerts allows for more personalization. You can choose what you would like to see and how often you wish to see it. Google will alert you with what its spiders find by crawling the web and/or what they find about you in groups, forums, blogs and the news, depending upon the parameters you set. Google Alerts are delivered via e-mail. Visit http://www.google.com/alerts to setup your own alerts.

If you are not yet wired into alerts, give them a try. Not only can you keep track of online information about yourself and your website, you can also track your competitors and their websites through these free services. In fact, competition research may be where their greatest value lies.

Things you may want to track:

names of the business, owner and key executives
key products, services and brands
keyword phrases
URLs, including every page of a website, if you are so inclined

What you can learn from your alerts:

what is being said about you and your competitors
when links to your website or your competitors’ are found
when pages are changed and indexed
when your competition has a newsworthy event
when your press releases are being picked up by the online media
frequency of indexing

Think about all of the ways this information can be useful to your online marketing. If you don’t have the time or inclination to manage all of this yourself, call the online marketing experts at Blizzard Internet Marketing for help at 888-840-5893.

Mary Bowling - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.