Link building can often times be a tedious process, especially for those doing manual outreach. As an SEO, I am always looking for new ways to cut down the time it takes to build quality inbound links for my clients. What better way to do this than through automation?

Google Alerts allows you to monitor words or phrases and emails you once new content using these defined phrases are indexed by the search engine. The tool is also extremely valuable for brand management, but below are two ways that we use it to find new link opportunities.

Alerts for your brand name

Set up an alerts based around your brand name. Make sure to use different combinations, with and without spaces as well as possible spelling variations. You can specify what type of content you want the tool to alert you about including blogs, news, video, and discussions. Setting up alerts to include discussions is a good idea because you can jump into comment threads to either defend or add info about your brand.

Once the new content that matches your defined phrases is triggered, Google will then send you an email with information about the page and a link to the page. When this is sent out, you can analyze the site and decide if it is reputable enough to try to obtain a link. If you decide that it is, we usually just send an email through the contact page asking if they would be nice enough to link back to the given site. More times than not the webmasters have no issue with doing so.

Alerts for link opportunities 

Another tactic that we have used is to set up an alert for phrases that could possibly yield a link opportunity. For instance, if your site specialty is crafts for kids, we would set up an alert for ‘Summer Projects for Kids’, ‘Craft Projects for Kids’ and other similar key phrases.

We know that our client site has great content based around these topics and that site owners may be interested in linking to it. Each time a potentially valuable link prospect posts a new article that triggers one of these phrases we begin our outreach.

We provide them with some similar articles or other tools that we think their audience may value. It is an opportunity for you to share your content with others in your niche. Keeping a friendly tone and assuring them that you are just trying to help out their readers (which you are) is key here. We also only set up alerts that target our clients best pieces of content. The better the content, the more willing sites are willing to link.

Lastly, remember to make use of quotations for exact key phrases (ex “enter exact phrase”), AND, and OR to better target your alerts. This will help you define your phrases and get the most out of this tool. You will be surprised how many link opportunities you will come across by taking 5-10 minutes to set up some Google Alerts.