Staying abreast of what’s happening within your niche is generally a good idea. Without a constant eye into the world of affairs that affects your brand’s influence, you can quickly and easily fall behind on current events or late-breaking ideas. In order to be truly connected with your audience, you need to know what’s happening that they find interesting.

Setting up alerts to stay informed on multiple subjects is recommended even if you’re just a casual follower of news – but it’s especially important for brands seeking to influence audiences. Today, we’ll examine exactly why setting up alerts via Google is a smart idea.

Get Instant Notifications About Your Brand

Running an online small business? Operate a community blog? Whatever your online presence may be, it can be very good to know when others are talking about you. With Google Alerts, you can customize unique alerts for your brand and any/all related categories. This helps ensure that your competitors aren’t pinging websites with negative content without you knowing, and also helps you stay in touch with other blogs and websites that may be referencing your content. While there are many ways to monitor mentions, you can never be too safe: setup Google Alerts for your brand and always be in the know when new content referencing you emerges.

Stay in the Loop About Your Niche

It never hurts to scour search engines on a regular basis for news and new content relating to your niche. However, Google Alerts can take most of the guesswork out of it for you. By configuring any number of unique alerts for various topics, website s and themes, you’ll be able to keep an eye out for new content ideas and beat the competition to the table with your fresh, new takes. In many cases, ranking in search engines is all about who gets the story out first: with alerts from Google, you’ll have a great chance at winning the battle of timeliness.

It’s Free, Easy & Comprehensive

There are many tools out there that provide alerts and notifications for mentions and late-breaking news. For bigger brands with a lot invested, paying for a premium solution makes sense. However, for most small brands and businesses, Google Alerts provides all the functionality you need to be competitive.

Setting up Google Alerts couldn’t be easier. Simply head to google.com/alerts, enter one or more search terms that you want to monitor, select your options for alerts and create them. After that, you’ll be notified any time new news or information is published on the topics you’ve selected. In just a couple of minutes, you can configure multiple alerts that’ll give your brand an edge.

Another good reason to be pinging websites via Google Alerts is the options it provides. If you want to get an alert for every new mention or piece of content related to the niche, you can do so. If you’d prefer to filter out all but the best results, that is also an option. With additional options to filter by language, geography and type of content (news, blog post, website pages, etc), you can customize the alerts to be specifically relevant to your needs.

Given that it just takes a couple of minutes of time, you have no reason not to setup the free Google Alerts service. This will help you keep an eye on your brand, your niche and even your competitors: you can’t afford to overlook such a useful service!