Five Creative Uses for Google Alerts

Google Alerts is one of Google's hidden gems. It's a really powerful tool to keep track of trends, interesting topics, or anything really new that appears on the web. If you're not using it already, here are a few creative ways to get started with it.

Google Alerts may not be one of Google's most popular services, but it's definitely one of the most useful. When the service gave us a scare earlier this month, many worried it was on the chopping block next to Google Reader. I put out the call on Twitter to see if anyone actually used it, and was surprised by some of the ways many of you put it to good use. Alerts is back now and working better than ever, so Google was probably just monkeying around under the hood. If you're not using it though, now is a great time to start. Here are some clever ways to put it to work.

Perform Automated Vanity Searches and Find Out Who's Talking About You

One of the best uses for Google Alerts is to keep track of how often people are talking about you on the web and what they're saying. One common refrain I heard when I talked to people about how they used Google Alerts was that they used them to find out what people were saying about the company they worked for, their non-profit, their startup, or about them personally (or their blog). One startup founder I spoke to even said it's a great way to get a service that PR companies charge for entirely for free.

Whether you're trying to find out whether people are gossiping about you personally or you want to know what people are saying about your company, Google Alerts makes performing automatic vanity searches a snap. All you have to do is type in your name or your company's name in the search query field. Tell Alerts whether you want all results or just the high quality ones, when you want them delivered, and how you want them sent to you (you can have them sent via email or have Alerts generate an RSS feed for you to subscribe to. If you're really obsessive, you have all results delivered to you as they happen, but depending on your popularity, you may want some mail filters set up in advance.

Stay Up to Date On News from Far Away

If you're an expat living far from home, or just someone who's moved away from their hometown but still wants to know what's going on in your old neighborhood, Google Alerts can help you with that too. Just modify the search terms for the name of your hometown, your home country, or if you want really specific results, your zip code. Like any Google search, you can add as many search terms as you like to narrow the results, and put long names in quotes to get exact matches.

One of my friends living in New York uses Alerts to stay on top of the news where he grew up (and where his family still lives) so he can get crime alerts for his parents' neighborhood, and he finds out whenever someone he went to school with makes the news—for good or ill—before it's plastered all over Facebook.

Follow a Trending Story, or Get a Snapshot of Events On Your Own Time

Right now, many of us are absorbed with the investigation into the bombings in Boston. Others of us are following the ongoing conflict in Syria. However, watching the news all day or being inundated with a never-ending stream of reports—some of them inaccurate and bound for retraction—is just too much to deal with. Google Alerts lets you take control of the news stream and get up to speed on a specific topic when you're ready. Tweak the search terms for the issue you're following, and change the "How Often" to once a day for a simple digest. Once a week may be too much for a story that's actively developing, but once a day is fine for those of us who don't have the time to stay glued to the latest news reports.

Prefer to drink from the fire hose? "As-It-Happens" is always an option, and Google Alerts will feed you new news stories and search results of all types as soon as they index them. It's not as fast as social media like Twitter or Facebook, but it's pretty quick. To stick to reports from news agencies, make sure to change the "Result Type" from "Everything" to "News" or "Blogs." You may also want to change "How Many" to "Only the Best Results" to weed out the cruft. One friend on Twitter noted that he uses Google Alerts to deliver a kind of "morning snapshot" of events that occured overnight, which I thought was pretty creative.
If your news-gathering has less to do with current events and has more to do with entertainment, tech news, or you have a specific public figure, politician, actor, or personality you want to follow (without being creepy), Google Alerts is perfect for that as well. You can even set up a Google Alert for new videos released by your favorite comedian or YouTube channel, get them delivered via RSS, and watch them as they come out without having to check their channel manually. Of course, you can also use it to harvest as much information as possible about your favorite celebrity's public statements and appearances, but come on, don't make it weird.

Search for Coupon Codes, Discounts, and Promotions

Google Alerts is great for information gathering, but it's also a great bargain hunting tool. You can set an alert for coupon codes or discounts to your favorite retailer, and then sit back and let the bargains come to you. Not all of them will be of particularly high quality and you'll still have to sift through the results to find something useful. Even so, you'll hear about new coupon codes as soon as they hit the web, and you'll get first dibs on using them.

This is especially useful if you're trying to grab a discount code that's only valid for a few hundred uses, or if you want a 10% off code for your favorite web hosting company or domain registrar. Just set the search term for the type of discount you want (taking care not to be too specific), set the result quality as broad as possible, and let Google do the work for you.

Go Job Hunting

If you're unemployed or just looking for a better gig, you can use all the help you can get. Google Alerts lets you search for job openings and have results delivered right to your inbox so you can jump on them and apply immediately. Sure, you can scour job boards, but the benefit of using Google Alerts is that you can target your alerts specifically to the companies you're interested in working for. You can even tailor them directly to the types of jobs you're looking for—and since every job site and public company website is indexed by Google, you'll probably be the first person to hear that the listing has been posted.

There's a great guide to doing this over at The Undercover Recruiter if you're thinking about giving it a try. After all, your job search will see more success if you target specific positions and specific companies with targeted resumes and cover letters that are relevant to the opportunity you want. Google Alerts lets you stalk your future gig with minimal effort, then strike first when the time is right.

Read More for Google Alerts

Guide: How to Register Trademark For Your Brand in India

How many cups of coffee and scribbles on a paper did it take for you to zero-in on your brand name? A dozen, right? Would you let some Tom, Dick or Harry walk away with that name and identity? Hell no! So to your rescue is trademark registration!

As an e-commerce platform helping small as well as big brands start their own online stores, we at Zepo, frequently come across entrepreneurs asking us about how to register their brands as trademarks. Which is why, today, within the course of this blog post, we’ll take you through on how to protect your brand’s reputation, by way of registering your brand as a trade-mark.

Before we start, what exactly does trade-marking a brand name mean?
Trademark registration of a brand name means nothing but brand name registration. It basically means, “this brand name is ours! And if you dare to use it to sell your products, we can sue you!”
In India, you can trademark any of the following or even a combination of these things:
Letter, Number, Word, Phrase, Logo, Graphic, Smell, Sound Mark or a Combination of Colors
So, what is the procedure of registering a trademark?

Step 1: Search for a “crazy-enough” brand name
You get the point, don’t you? Come up with a whacky and quirky brand name, because all the generic ones are any which way taken. Before zeroing in on one name, you might want to do a quick search to make sure that no one else is already using the name. And your best bet would be to use invented or coined words, in a combination with generic words.

Step 2: Making the trademark application
Now that your name is finalized upon, fill in the trademark application i.e. Form- TM 1. The application costs INR 3500 and is a one time fee.
Along with the application, you will need to submit a couple of supporting documents:
1. A Business registration concern: Depending on what type of a registered business you have, say sole proprietorship, etc. you will need to submit an identity proof of the directors of the company and an address proof.
2. An image of your brand logo in a standard size of 9 x 5 cms
3. If applicable, proof of claim of the proposed mark being used before in another country.

Step 3: Filling the brand name registration application
There are 2 ways to file the registration – manual filing or e-filling.
In case of manual filing, you will need to personally walk down and submit the application for registration to any one of the offices of the Registrar of Trade Marks located in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Ahmedabad. After which you receive the acknowledgement of the application and the receipt, usually within 15-20 days of the filing.
But in e-filing system, the acknowledgement of the application is issued immediately.
And after you receive the acknowledgement, you can start using the (TM) symbol next to the brand name!

Step 4: Examining the brand name registration application
After receiving the application, the Registrar checks whether the brand name complies with the law and does not conflict or dispute with other existing registered or pending brands. That’s why we said, quirky brand name, people!

Step 5: Publication in the Indian Trade Mark Journals
After examination, the logo or brand name is published in the Indian Trade Mark Journal. If no one raises an opposition within 3 months i.e. 90 days or in some cases 120 days, from the date of publication, the brand name proceeds to acceptance.

Step 6: Issuance of the trademark registration certificate
If no one raises any opposition, within the stipulated 90 days period, the Registrar accepts the trademark application! Woohoo! And issues a Certificate of Registration under the seal of Trademark Registry.

You may now be allowed to use the registered trademark symbol (®) next to your brand name, once the certificate has been issued.

The whole process of registration of a brand name usually takes anything between 15-18 months. The trademark once accepted, is valid for a period of 10 years from the date of issuance of the Certificate of Registration. After the end of 10 years, the trademark will need to be renewed.

There there! We can understand if this sounds a little too over-whelming. In which case, just call up a lawyer. The lawyer will be able to help you wade through all this legal jargon.

Although the process of registering a trademark is lengthy and a little heavy on the pocket, it is definitely worth the investment of legally protecting your brand.

However, if you are just starting out, investing in a trademark may not be absolutely essential. What matters most is creating awesome products and putting in all the time and effort into building your brand, from ground up. But, there still is another cheaper alternative to lend you lawful protection against being copied – an unregistered trademark. Do ask your lawyer about it!

Read More here about Register your TradeMark

How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

SEO is expensive, competitive, and hard. But as a local business, you have something significant going for you: your pool of competition is much smaller than the ones national and international brands have to deal with.
Your website doesn’t need to be found by everyone; you just need to be found by the people who live in your community. If you get that right, the results can be significant. Half of consumers that do a local search on their smartphone end up visiting a store they found there that same day.
When people do a search in Google, they’ll see a map and a list of the top three local listings that are nearby, before they see any other results.


In local searches like this one, users get plenty of information on those top three choices right away – they can see both how other customers have rated each of them and exactly how far away they are. For most consumers, that’s enough information to make a decision and head out, without ever bothering to scroll further down.
For local businesses - seo starterpack, that means that while making sure your website is optimized for search engines matters, making sure that your Google My Business Listing is optimized matters at least as much.

1. Set up your Google Business Listing (if you haven’t yet).

The first step is to set up (or claim) your Google My Business Listing. Go to Google’s My Business page and click “Start Now” in the upper left corner. Then fill in every relevant field that Google offers. You want to make sure the profile is as complete as possible and that every piece of information is accurate.
 

2. Choose a relevant, specific category.

The category you choose will help Google decide which searches your local listing belongs in. You have to choose from the list of available categories, you can’t create your own. If there’s not a specific category that describes what your business is, settle on a more general one that still describes it accurately.
If possible though, you want to go for the most specific category available. “Grocery Store” is a more competitive term than “Gourmet Grocery Store” or “Indian Grocery Store.” The latter categories are more likely to land you in the top three for relevant searches, especially if you’re in a city with a lot of grocery stores.

 

3. Load quality, high-resolution images.

Photos help your listing to stand out and give potential customers a glimpse of what to expect.  Make sure you use high-quality images that make your business look good and show off your products (if you sell physical products).
Consider hiring a Google approved photographer to create a 360-view virtual tour of your business for customers. According to Google, listings that have a virtual tour and photos generate twice as much interest as those without.

4. Make sure your information matches everywhere else.

One thing Google’s algorithm looks at to verify the legitimacy of a listing is a consistency in how it’s listed across different websites. While that seems simple enough – your address is the same each time you enter it somewhere – it’s easy for little differences to slip in. Maybe you wrote out the Road part of the street name one time, and shortened it to Rd another time, for instance.
Pick a standard way to write out your address, a consistent phone number to use, and make sure all your listings match both each other and the information you provide on your website. And work on getting your website listed in as many relevant directories as possible.

5. Use a local number.

In addition to keeping your phone number consistent between your different listings, it’s also important to use a phone number with a local area code. That’s one extra signal to Google that you are actually local. Make sure the number you use for your Google My Business listing is also displayed somewhere on your home page or whatever landing page you link to from your Google listing.

6. Avoid penalty-inducing offenses.

Any work you do to optimize your website or local listing will be for naught if you incur a penalty. Google suspends business listings for a range of offenses. Getting suspended is stressful, confusing, and bad for business, so it’s best to avoid doing anything that puts you at risk of it.
Read through Google’s guidelines for Google My Business listings so you have a full understanding of what not to do. Some of the main things to avoid are:

• Using a URL that redirects to your website’s URL, rather than the actual URL itself.
• Trying to awkwardly add keywords into your business name field.
• Having multiple local listings for the same business location.
• Using any address for your business that isn’t a physical storefront or office space where you meet with customers.

Use common sense and don’t try to play the system or get extra listings and you’ll probably stay on the right side of Google.

7. Encourage reviews.

You’ll notice that the local businesses listed in the map snippet of a local search usually have star ratings next to their name. Google wants to provide the most useful information to its users, and users want to find the nearby business that seems the best. In both cases, it benefits your business to have a high star rating.
Ask your happy customers to take a few minutes to give you a review on Google. Include an encouragement on promotional materials you hand out or put up in your store. A gentle nudge or a reminder of how much it means for your business can make your loyal customers that much more likely to take the time to say a few kind words about you.

8. Make sure your website and content is optimized for search.

All the usual SEO advice that helps strengthen the authority of your website in the eyes of Google matters here too.  So don’t focus on optimizing your local listing to the exclusion of optimizing your website as well.
Make sure that you:

Read More about Google Business Listing

11 SEO Techniques and Strategies for 2017 (Infographic)

11 SEO Techniques and Strategies

With every upload to the internet, there is only one subliminal message echoing through the void expanse of websites: Keep up.

Naturally, it is not expected of you to ‘keep up’ with everything the internet offers-it is not possible. However, if you are someone who contributes to the mass of knowledge that is the internet, then your aim should be to put your content out there, right in everyone’s faces and make them WANT to read it.

Of course, if it was that easy, everyone would know everything and the search engines would become pointless. Today, only the smartest search engine optimizers with latest SEO techniques and strategies, and the best content writers reach the pedestal where they are the number one hit on the SERPs.

We are here to help you get there.

Pay attention to our following tips to learn the advanced SEO strategies in 2017, and start working on it before this year ends:

1. Mobile is the future

Something that almost everyone understands. It makes sense too. Do you think people in the future will walk around with desktops? No, because its ridiculous.

The vast population of people who are on the move use mobile devices for all their internet purposes. Many even use it at home. A lot don’t even own laptops.

Start working on a website that is mobile friendly or custom-made for it. Not doing so is guaranteeing yourself a setback.

Our personal advice: Go responsive instead of making a special website for mobiles. RWD is not a joke, and will be a better option.

2. The rise of voice search

Some movies do very little to limit our imagination of future technologies. Being able to speak to machines and having them work for us was among the top of the list for the R&D of various companies. Today, it is possible. Those who use ‘Siri’ on their iPhones are no strangers to this fact.

The time has come to include a recording button on your website to entertain voice requests and serve people better. This will free the user to put their fingers to better use like holding the morning coffee on the way to work, etc.

After all, who wants to type so much?

3. Make your site super-fast

Not everyone has access to high-speed internet. There are more complaints about slow internet speed than there are users. In the midst of all this, if your site has the audacity to load slowly and take its own sweet time through the tough hustle in the lives of the users — Don’t even bother optimizing your sites. Without speed, there is nothing.

Optimize the formats and responsive sizes of the media that you have uploaded onto your website and eliminate loose links and pointless data that slows down loading time.

Remember: its a race.

You can use these tools to check the webpage loading speed: Pingdom or GTmetrix

4. Make your website mobile friendly

Do I need a mobile friendly website?

Have you ever asked yourself this question? The truth is, a major section of target audiences are surfing internet through their smart phones; if you haven’t done it already get it right now.

Google has already programmed an algorithm on April 21, 2015 that the sites which are mobile friendly in nature will be given higher priority and rank them better in search results. They have given clear guidelines about how to make a website mobile friendly.

Use the Mobile-Friendly Test tool by Google to see if pages on your site are mobile-friendly or not.

Read More for SEO Techniques for 2017

How to Convince your Clients Regarding SEO & the Techniques you Perform

As a SEO Professional you will know all the major importance of SEO and what you have to do for a website to generate and increase traffic. But what about your clients? How do they know about the improvement?
If your traffic for your website get increased day by day then you can say your website is improving. But you cannot expect the tangible results immediately. It may take months or years to improve. But what about clients? Why they have to pay you if they are not getting their website improved?
If a client is simply asking just for a website without SEO but need their website to rank in search engine. IS this possible? No!
You have to make your client understand that SEO only can help their website to improve in the search engines. So how can you do that?
Let’s see today how you are going to make them understand of the importance of SEO for their website.
As a SEO Expert you will know all technical terms in your industry, but the client is not going to know if you are explaining about the SEO techniques through technical terms. This will be just buzzwords for them. So always be clear and precise about what you talk to your clients regarding SEO.
Don’t bring up every SEO techniques and explain it to them. Just it’s good to focus on the result you are going to do on doing SEO. Explain in a simple way so that he can understand the benefits he is going to get him through SEO.
What if you are explaining the importance of SEO and he gets  no idea of it? In place of the importance you can explain with an example. You can say it with your favorite analytics tool and show them how much traffic, conversions are achieved for the website your are doing now. You have to explain performing SEO will increase their website ranking in the Search engine ranking page. This will lead to the sales of your website.
Explain them SEO is user friendly, cost effective and a long lasting process. Show them up with some of the proposal you have for your company. Here are some of them.
Here is the set of SEO techniques i perform for my clients.

On Page Optimization:

The action that you perform on the site is On page Optimization. Some of the effective on page optimization includes Keyword Research, checking for the long tail keyword, phrases, targeted search volume for the keyword you are choosing, URL optimization, unique meta tag creations, header tag optimization, Alt tag optimization, SEO friendly URLS and structure, internal links, external links, multimedia dazzling, permalink structure, creating sitemap, robot, submitting it to the search engines, Configuration of Google Analytics, Google Ad words, tag manager , effective content for all types of keywords.

Off Page Optimization:

The action you perform off the page is off page optimization. Some of the effective off page optimization includes blogging, web 2.0 submissions, article submissions, directory, classified submissions, image and video optimization, social bookmarking, search engine submissions, info graphic, PPT, PDF submissions, Business Listing, content optimization, static and dynamic web page optimization etc.

Pay per Click:

This is a paid campaign, if you are not doing paid campaigns, it is not a problem for your page to rank. Through this paid campaign you can get the result easily and also rapidly. For immediate promotion of your website you can try this out.

Social Media Marketing:

Sharing your content in the social media is the effective method of promoting your website rapidly. Some of the social media marketing includes marketing in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest etc…
Any ideas or tips guys regarding the topic? Please do share it in the comment section below.

Read More >>

Local SEO Marketing – Step by Step Guide

Read More for Local SEO Marketing