http://www.tampa-seo.com Video transcript (with minor edits).

Hey Guys, Steve Scott here from the Tampa SEO Training Academy.  I received an interesting question from one of my former students that I thought I’d share.  She says, “I’ve discovered one of our competitors is beating us to the punch on launching a new product that parallels ours… NOT GOOD.  What suggestions would you make for me to find information on their activities that wouldn’t be obvious to the naked eye?”

Well, what I was thinking about after reading this was a great tool from Google called Google Alerts.  What Google Alerts allows you to do is set up an alert so that whenever Google finds anything on the web that mentions something you are interested in, Google will send you information about it.

So, if you go to http://www.google.com/alerts you’ll see this page that shows up.  You simply go to where it says “Search terms:” and say you want to find something about the New York Jets, just type in New York Jets.

Then, you can select what you want to find, whether it’s everything that Google discovers, News items, Blog posts, Videos and so on.  I typically just leave this on Everything.

Next, select how often you want to find out about it. Whether as it happens, in other words as Google discovers it, once a day or once a week.  I usually go once a day.

You can then change the volume of information you get.  So if you are getting a very large amount of information or setting up an alert on a topic area that’s sure to have a high volume of data you can select “Only the best results” rather than “All results”.  I’ll generally leave it at only the best results at first.

Lastly, you can select where you want the information delivered to?  Select either your email address, which would be your Google account that you’d want to sign in with or you can set up an RSS feed and use that instead. I’m going to say to just send it to my Tampa SEO Training Academy account and hit “Create Alert”.

Now what will happen is, you see I’ve got several of them here, whenever Google finds any information about what you want an alert about it will send you email.  So this is great!  You can put in your own company name, you own products or in the case of the client, since she’s trying to discreetly keep an eye on her competitor, she can put in the competitors name,  company name, the URL of the company, the name of the competitors product or product line.  Now, anytime Google finds any information out about that particular product or company name, they’ll shoot her an email.

So it’s a great tool, easy to use,  easy to set up… Again it’s www.google.com/alerts and I would definitely suggest you check it out.  Even if all you do is put in your own company name in for brand management so you can be informed of when Google finds information about you that you might not have know that somebody else put out on the web.

Good Luck and Good Rankings.

Steve Scott