Who's Talking About You Online

Everyone who depends on their business's reputation should frequently Google themselves to find out who is saying what about you, online. The problem is, this isn't something you think about on a day to day basis, so weeks and months may go by where you're left in the dark.

Google Alerts to the rescue! This tool is a very quick and easy way to setup a daily, weekly or monthly report on your business or personal name. What Google Alerts does is take a keyword you want monitored and scans every page that Google indexes on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
*Note: You can also use this to keep track of your competition.

Example:

1. Say your business is named: Henry Automotive
2. You would go to www.google.com/alerts and monitor the keyword "henry automotive". Make sure to use " " around the keywords so that you're only searching that keyword combination and not 'henry' and automotive' separately.
3. Now you'll get a daily, weekly or monthly (you decide) email on links to articles Google lists on thier search engine.

Funky Results:
At first you will get a lot of older listings popping up over the course of a few weeks, but once they've been mentioned once, they won't be sent to your email again.

You may end up with other results for "henry automotive" that you have nothing to do with you, such as another automotive company or a sentences that are written like "... and I saw Henry. Automotive experts will..."

If you have a business or common name such as a toy shop I know called "Happily Ever After" or "John Smith", then results can seriously muddled. In those cases I would suggest adding several more alerts with additional keywords in them.
"Happily Ever After toys"
"Happily Ever After in Philadelphia" or
"John Smith" painter (notice how I left one of the keywords outside the " ")

~
Alex Seigfried, Owner
Philadelphia, PA