Target Marketing with Google Alerts

Everyone knows what Google Alerts are. Most of us overlook this SEO/eMarketing tool in our quest to find something sexier, more powerful.  The few webmasters who are familiar with this tool see it as nothing more than an excellent way to catch bloggers flaming their posts, spammers, or people damaging a corporate image. These barely taps into the usefulness of this tool.

Google Alerts has proven to be a powerful tool in the hands of an expert eMarketer/Social Networking guru. They put the emphasis is on web-surfers, not page rank. This may seem revolutionary, but the whole purpose of generating traffic is to find shoppers, real people, not algorithms.  It is possible to have 100 pages land in the top 10 search engine placements, and still have a conversion-to-buyer ratio that is so low it will not pay the web hosting fees.

Focusing on people first, targeting consumers who are ready to buy, requires a slightly different approach to SEO. Targeting humans is not as precise as targeting a search engine.

There are advantages to targeting the human who owns the Visa card. First, it reduces the number of steps between hooking a client and closing-out the shopping cart.

Google Alerts are a powerful eMarketing tool in the right hands. The search engines can only do so much. They can calculate. When used right, these calculations bring people to a website. They cannot follow social trends, impulse shopping trends, or social preferences.

Relevant Links

One of the most frustrating things for webmasters is turning page rank into sales. There are more link building schemes than there are search engines, most are worthless. The trick to building exposure is to build links. The secret to attracting real people to a website is to give them something they want.

This is where Google Alerts come in. Google Alerts can be set to track topics. A classic car sales person may set their Google Alerts to track the keywords on their sites, their company name, and personal name. This tracks their impact on the website.

The tool can also track keywords relating to car shows, improvements, engineering developments, shows, events, etc. These Alerts track relevant conversations, fan based discussions and hot forum topics.

Customer Conversion

The customer does not always come to the website. A webmaster can control their conversion results by going to the user. Example, the top keywords are: buy widgets, find widgets, and cheap widgets. However, a behavioral marketer completes a report. These keywords send 10 000 visitors to a website, but only 5 convert.

The consumers use different keywords: brand X widgets, widget replacement parts, and how to use the widget. These keywords may bring low traffic, only 2000. Shoppers use these keywords, increasing the conversion rate to 25.

Target Marketing

The alert will bring webmasters to a blog or forum when the topic is still hotly debated.  These hot topics remain at the top of searches for weeks, or months. They are a great time to participate in the topic and increase exposure.

How to Get Started

•Watch the Pros. They will have a readymade audience. Their articles are designed to satisfy the needs of their fan-base. These sites are predominately Content Management Systems, making them the perfect place to find people who are pre-sold on a product or service.

•Build Relationships with the professionals. Anyone can brand themselves as a professional, ‘by association.’ The key to success is ‘not’ promoting yourself or product. Support the original article. Agree with the author. Offer at least one extra point.

•Link the username back to a similar article on your website – not the index page, squeeze page, or buy-now page.

•Track web analytics. Eliminate the keyword that brings people looking for freebies, downloads, and communities. Focus on those that bring shoppers.

•Search the top blogs or forums for <no=follow> code. They retain value as ‘hooks,’ but lose their value as ‘relevant links.’