Using Google Alerts to Piggyback on Your Competitors Marketing

One of my favorite tools for link development is Google Alerts. Google alerts allows you to enter in a keyword and whenever Googlebot comes across that keyword in a new page it will send you an email. It’s an invaluable service on it’s own, and an extremely powerful tool for link development.

We use it to build links in the following way:

1. Compile a list of our clients competitors
2. Add a Google alert for those terms
3. When we receive an alert, find the blog owner, site owner, or reporter who wrote about the competitor and write an informal friendly email to them letting them know about our client.

We have found this to be tremendously effective for a lot of our clients. Authors and reporters love to reuse material, and catching them while your product or industry is fresh in their minds is invaluable.

Some words of warning: don’t try to automate the emails unless you are well versed in CANSPAM and the perils of automated emails. Make the communication as personal as possible, and send them on behalf a person high up in the company (CEO, etc). Be prepared to exchange emails with them, and make sure the person communicating is knowledgeable about your company, not some outsourced link monkey.

Happy link building.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.