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Have you ever wondered what your customers are saying about your products or services and wish you had a way to track this? If you have been building a business of any kind it’s likely you’ve asked yourself this question… but you’ve probably wondered how you could also track your competitors and keep track of what they are doing in your market.

Lets face it, staying on top of your niche markets and your competitors is vital if you are going to stay on top of your game, it’s also vital to have this information so that you can develop products or services that your customers say they want, even if they aren’t telling you directly what it is they say they need. I have been using this tool to track all of these things in the niche markets that interest me for quite some time now and the gems I am able to gather because of this knowledge just cannot be beat.

I’ve been contemplating whether or not I should reveal this information here simply because I will be arming not only your competitors with this same information, but also my own. Now if you’ve purchased any of our products you probably already have this knowledge, but for most, this very well could be a shocking little secret that you wished you knew about a long time ago.

Google’s Tools Rock!

If you’ve spent any time here on M3 then you know it’s no big secret that I love Google. Out of any other company out there, Google has been responsible for helping my businesses to grow more than any other and it’s due to the tools and data we are able to extract from this phenominal search engine and as you will soon see, this tool is just one of the many you should be using that’s within their aresenal.

The tool I’m referring to is called Google Alerts.

Now before you go hog wild and start creating a plethora of alerts, I highly recommend that you go get yourself a new GMail account specifically to track all of your alerts because it can easily stuff your inbox with more alerts than you can handle and I would hate to see you plug up your primary email address with all these alerts. So head over to Gmail and grab yourself a new email address.

Now that you have that all taken care of, let me show you what you can accomplish with this fantastic tool.

How Does Google Alerts Work?

There are currently 6 different search Types you can perform and they are ‘News’, ‘Web’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Comprehensive’, ‘Video’ and ‘Groups’. A brief explanation for these types of searches is below:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

There are also 3 different types of Alert Frequency and they are ‘As it Happens’, ‘Once a day’ or ‘Once a week’.

How Would I Use This Tool to Track a Niche, Competitor and/or Customer?

Lets say you have a business in the Dog Training Niche and you want to track what people are saying about your product. All you have to do is:

• Enter the Search phrase you want to track
• The Type of search you want to be alerted for
• The frequency of the Alerts
• The email address you want the Alerts to be sent to
• Click Create Alert

So for our Dog Training Niche let’s say you have a website called ‘www.GuardDogTraining.com’ and you have an ebook called ‘Pro Guard Dog Training’, you would create two alerts, one for ‘www.GuardDogTraining’ and another for ‘Pro Guard Dog Training’ and then you will receive an email from Google whenever the Googlebots find an instance of your alert phrase.

If you wanted to be really aggressive about your alerts, and you wanted to cover all of the possible options, you would actually have to create 3 alerts for each phrase, one using Comprehensive (which includes, News, Web and Blogs), another for Groups and lastly one for Video. This would give you an alert for every possible option within Google Alerts.

Now let’s think outside the box for a moment …You could even create an alert to cover what might be a possible product you might want to produce. For example, let’s say you wanted to see what people were saying about “dog has problem losing weight” and could create an alert of this phrase to not only see what people are saying about this particular phrase, but find out where they are posting this kind of information to get answers. Are they getting answers to their questions? If not, then you may have an area where a product needs to be created to provide a solution.

Granted, this is just an example, but I think you can start to see where you might be able to do some pretty creative data mining using this tool.

Please feel free to post how you are using the tool and whether it’s giving you useful information.

Talk to you soon,

Michael

I’m a big fan of Niche Research, in fact, they don’t call me ‘That Son of a Niche’ for nothing! I do a lot of it and so tools like what Google has put together here are great time savers and provide very useful data. I have been using Google Trends for quite awhile now to do Niche Research, but they have just released some new functionality that will blow your mind and give you a massive boost in competing in any niche you may be involved in.

Trends for Websites

So what they have done, is added a section called ‘Trends for Websites‘

In this portion of Google Trends you can now type in URL’s of your competitors for example, and it will compare them, but what’s really powerful about this new functionality is that it allows you to see where your competitor’s customers are visiting and where they go once they get there.  This gives you an insight into how customers visiting a particular kind of site are navigating when looking for certain products and services.

This trend data is compiled from multiple sources and isn’t strictly from Google’s own search data and is aggregated from millions of users.  One other caveat for this new functionality within Google Trends for Websites is that not all websites can be searched using this new tool and is only going to work for sites that are currently getting significant traffic.

Head on over to Trends for Websites and follow along with what I’m going to describe here.

Now, if you’ve done research online to help you not only build better websites, but also used it to find out where your competitors are getting their traffic, you will instantly see how powerful this new section really is.

So, as you can see from the pic below, I did a search in “Google Trends for Websites” using apple.com and dell.com by separating the URL’s with a comma.  Keep in mind that you’re not limited to just two URL’s (you can search up to 5) by just separating them with a comma.  I would not recommend doing more than a few in this case however because it will tend to obscure the other results that we are looking for in the ‘Also Visited’ and ‘Also Searched For’ columns.

If you look at the upper right hand corner of the blue title area, you can select the region and also specify the timeframe that you want to look at.  This is so powerful because you can even have it show you the results of the past 30 days, months, year(s) or even all years.

Once you have that set you can then examine the results and drill down even further into the ‘Subregions’, but also the ‘Also Visited’ and ‘Also Searched For’ columns to get a further refinement of the results shown.  Some of the results you can glean from this is very interesting, depending on the sites you are searching.

So, let me ask you something; do you think you could use this information to help Optimize your niche websites to get boat loads of highly targeted traffic?

So what else can this data show you?

Well, here are just a few suggestions:

• The “Subregions” area can show you what locations are getting the most traffic for these sites, all the way down to the state level.
• Provides data which indicates where their customers are navigating to once they reached their site.
• Indicates what their customers searched for once they reached the sites location, providing you valuable data on the behavior of their customers as a whole.
• And much, much more.

Just think about this for a few minutes and you can come up with other even more valuable pieces that can be extracted from this data.

One of the things I would really like to see Google do here is to actually add the number(s) for these searches shown, just like they do now within the Adwords keyword tool, instead of only providing the bar graph.  I’d also like to see them compile data for all websites (within reason) instead of only providing data for those getting millions of unique visitors. In any case, I think you’ll agree this is extremely powerful information and I for one really appreciate Google adding this functionality.  Not only is it going to benefit your own website optimization, but it is an excellent Niche research tool if used with that in mind.

See What The World Is Searching For

Google isn’t done yet.  They have also added a new section called ‘Google Insights for Search’ that allows you to analyze worldwide Google searches that will show you results which will indicate the interest by searchers over a specific timeframe.  It will list the top searches, top rising searches and even has a worldwide graphical heat map that shows the search volume index for all the different regions, subregions and cities.

I’ll be doing a detailed write up of how you can use this information to not only give your own websites a boost, but also to help you identify profitable Niche areas which you can capitalize on.

For more information about these tools and detailed instructions for how they work, check out the Google Insights for Search Help Center and the Google Trends for Websites Help area.

Talk to you all soon and become your own Son of a Niche!