Brand management is an important part of your SEO strategy.
You need to know how people are talking about your brand so that you can see what information might come up when people search for your brand or items related to your brand.
That might mean that you need to respond to a negative review or that you need to make good on a poor customer service experience that someone is advertising on their blog. Or it might mean that you need to correct some misinformation about your product or your brand itself.
You can’t do any of that if you don’t know what people are saying. But the Internet is a big, wide world, and keeping up with what everyone is saying is a big job.
The new Google Alert widget makes the job a little bit easier.
What the Widget Does
When you Google yourself or your brand name, you will get the standard search results, but you will also get a new “Stay in the Loop” widget.
The widget appears at the bottom of the search results on the first page. It allows you to sign up to receive alerts any time Google finds that your name has been mentioned online. You don’t have to manually search for your name, and you don’t have to rely on the basic Google Alert to get the information.
The widget returns the information in real time wherever you are surfing online.
The widget was just introduced last week. In order to use it, you have to allow Google to save your web and app activity. You can do so in your account settings.
Once you sign into the widget, you can choose the exact term you want to be notified for, and you can decide on the frequency. If you have a smaller brand, you may want to be notified as the mentions happen. If your brand is larger, you may be better off with a daily update.
Other Ways to Use the Widget
Of course, brand management is not the only possibility for this new widget.
Just like with Google Alerts, you can use the widget to be updated about any terms you want to monitor. That means you can get updates about keywords in your niche, learning when articles, blog posts, videos and other content is published about them.
Many brands use these types of alerts to stay up-to-date about the latest news in their industry. For example, if you write about parenting, you can use alerts to learn about the latest studies about breastfeeding, recalls on toys, or hot new TV shows.
You can also use these alerts for content curation and competitive research. You can see what others in your niche are publishing about your topics so that you can either share that information with your audience or so you can develop your own content. You can get ideas for new posts, or you can write response pieces to what you find through the alerts.
Other Strategies for Brand Management
You have many other tools and strategies available for managing your brand reputation online.
Many people use social media for both building and monitoring their brand reputation. You can search for posts about your brand by searching hash tags and mentions. Depending on how those comments are shared, you can also then respond publicly so that others see how you deal with customer complaints and problems.
Tools like Klout can help you see how you are performing on social media, based mostly on how you are marketing yourself but also on how others are talking about your brand.
Keeping a close eye on your link profile is another way you can keep tabs on your brand reputation. Many people who talk about your brand online will include a link either to your site or your social media profiles. If they are talking about a specific product, they will usually include a link directly to that page or to the image.
You can keep tabs on this by watching your incoming links and checking out each one that comes in. If you are getting negative press, you can reach out to the author to deal with the concern or resolve the problem. If you are getting positive press, you can use that to your advantage and share the link on your own site or social media profiles.
Brand management isn’t just about making sure that people know your name or recognize your logo. It is an important part of your online marketing strategy that ensures that your target audience is getting the messaging you want.
Poor brand management can mean that members of your target audience have a negative first impression of your brand — which may be their last. Use the new Google widget and the other tools at your disposal to take control of your brand management and make the impact you want.