Can Google Alerts Help The Agent?

I had a client ask me; “I heard about Google Alerts, they sound interesting, how can I use them in my real estate business?”.

I guess before I talk about Google Alerts let me first explain what they are. Google Alerts are emails that are automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms. So in essence you can have Google send you an email based on a set of keywords you deem important. You setup an alert with a keyword term such as “Short Sales New Jersey” and Google will search the Internet based on the following ways:

1. A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
2. A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
3. A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
4. A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
5. A ‘Video’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
6. A ‘Groups’ alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search. 3. How do I sign up?

So how can these alerts help yo? Well first off you can stay in touch with local news or stay on top of the competition. Know what your competitors are doing. Also most home buyers prefer a REALTOR that is in touch with the local community. Now with so much going on setting up alerts for community keyword terms could certainly help you. What about Real Estate related topics you think are important to you? The power of Google Alerts is they are a push technology so you just sit back and when a match is found you get emailed. While it does not pick up all the matches it does find a lot.

You get to determine the frequency of the alerts when you set up your alert. The frequency is not necessarily how often you’ll receive alerts, it is how often they are checked. If you select “once a day,” Google will check for new results once a day, which means you’ll get a maximum of one email per day. If you choose the “as it happens,” Google will check for new results continuously and send you an alert whenever we find a new result.

I use them all the time to monitor my own websites, blogs, and also I monitor my competition. They work great and I get all types of interesting information back.

To give them a try go to http://www.google.com/alerts.

In my next post I will explain step by step setting up alerts. Good luck.