An important part of any SEO specialist’s job is to build quality links. It also happens to be one of the tougher parts, considering the time it takes to manually search for websites that can provide links. Thankfully, there’s Google Alerts to make the job so much easier.
So how can this be used for link building?
- Brand Interest – Your company (or your client’s) brand comes first, so check how much people are talking about it by inputting its name, its domain name, and every possible iteration of both on the search query box. You can then learn if anyone of note is talking about the brand and how people view the brand, whether it’s positive or negative.
When you see positive feedback, show your gratitude and provide more info about the brand that they would also be interested in. Also, if there are no back links provided, you can kindly ask for one. For negative feedback, try your best to answer complaints to turn their image of the brand around.
- Competitor Interest – The saying “know your enemy” also applies to link building. Learn from their strengths and flaws based on what people are saying about their brand, and apply them to your brand’s strategies. If you believe your company/client can offer a superior product or service to a website that a competitor has gotten a link from, feel free to persuade the website’s owner to switch over in a professional manner.
- Questions in Your Niche – By entering the right questions, Google Alerts will provide you the latest queries that people usually ask in the niche of your company/client. This would then give you the opportunity to quickly provide the answers these people are looking for. When you use this feature, use the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, why) and “how” and direct these curious minds with links to your content.
By showing your knowledge on the topic, you can then convince these people to check out more of your company/client’s website and give backlinks in their own websites.
- Guest Posting Opportunities – Guest posts are one of the best ways to drive traffic to a website, as this practice allows you to reach a new audience, establish your brand’s authority, and of course, provide back links. Automating the process of looking for websites to guest post on will increase this technique’s efficiency.
Common terms to use for Google Alerts are “write for us”, “become a contributor”, and “submit guest post”.
These are just some of the ways Google Alerts can be used to help make prospecting for links much easier. You can set up different emails for specific alerts so you don’t get bogged down sorting through each one, and limit how often you get the alerts to once a week lest you lose focus on other important aspects of link building.
About the Author: Jared Mumford is the Co-Founder and CEO of SEO Visions, a Vancouver SEO Company that provides Online Marketing Solutions for different types of business.
