Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Imagine a product similar to Google Alerts, only much better. It’s built specifically for marketers and SEOs. This product not only finds mentions of your keywords and brand, but also reports new links to any website or URL you choose. It comes equipped with advanced search operators to discover new opportunities, and its exportable metrics are sortable by both date and Feed Authority.

To top it all off, it now alerts you via email whenever it finds something new.

Announcing Fresh Alerts from Fresh Web Explorer

For the past few months we’ve enjoyed using Fresh Web Explorer, which has quickly become my favorite new marketing tool. Since then, our engineers and developers have been working to add email alerts to the mix to vastly improve its value.

Starting today, when you use Fresh Web Explorer, you can now set up alerts for up to 10 queries of your choice. The emails are sent daily whenever anything new is discovered. Because Fresh Web Explorer refreshes its index every 8 hours, this means you can be notified of new links and mentions literally within hours after they appear on the web.

When you run a query in Fresh Web Explorer, you have the opportunity to create an alert based on that search.

One key feature is the ability to set your timezone. This helps tailor the reporting specific to your area of the world, so the alerts are more relevant to you.

Fresh Alerts for SEO and inbound marketing

I’ve had the opportunity to beta-test Fresh Alerts for two months, and I can say without hesitation that it’s literally changed the way I do SEO and inbound marketing. We also tested the product with 1,000 Moz beta users, and the feedback has showcased the variety of ways folks are using Fresh Alerts.

1. Link building

While we built Fresh Alerts as a mentions tool, it does a remarkably good job at helping to build links through the process of link reclamation. By using the built-in search operators, you can set your alerts to find non-linking mentions of your brand or keywords on the web.

For example, if I want to search for folks who mention MozRank (a Moz branded term) but don’t include a link to Moz, I’d set up my Fresh Alert like this:

mozrank –rd:moz.com (mentions of Mozrank that don’t link to the root domain moz.com)

With this alert set, every day I would get a new Fresh Alert in my inbox with a list of mentions. Looking at the number of non-linking mentions above, I’d better get link building!

2. Reputation management

Using Fresh Alerts, you can easily be notified whenever anyone mentions you name or brand on the web. Hopefully the information is positive which gives you the opportunity to open a relationship or simply stay on top of the information. If negative, you can reach out and try to mitigate the damage.

Here’s a Fresh Alert email set up for mentions of Rand Fishkin. (In this case, only included mentions that don’t link to moz.com are included.)

You could also use reputation-based alerts to send daily emails to your clients and monitor the conversation about your brand across the web.

3. Competitive intelligence

You can easily set up Fresh Alerts to notify you when your competition is in the news. Better yet, use the search operators to notify you when specific media outlets mention your competition.

In the example below, FEW shows us whenever “Amazon” is mentioned specifically on TechCrunch.

You can also monitor when and where your competitors earn new links. For example, if you wanted to set up a link alert for yourcompetition.com, simply use the Root Domain search operator, like so:

rd:yourcompetition.com (alerts for all new links to the root domain)

By understanding how your competitors earn links and mentions, you may discover new opportunities that are easy to replicate.

4. Reporting and content performance

This is a tip I don’t hear people talk about, so I thought I’d share it. Whenever we publish a big piece of content here at Moz, I set up a Fresh Alert to notify me whenever someone mentions it.

For example, we recently published the 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors. Because this was an important piece of content for us, I set up 2 different Fresh Alerts:

• One Fresh Alert notified me whenever people mentioned “Search Engine Ranking Factors” but didn’t link to Moz

• Another alert to tell me when people linked to the report itself

In the first example, I can reach out to those people who mentioned us without linking to see if I can start a relationship and possibly earn a link.

In the second example, as seen in the graph below, I can monitor our link-building efforts.

5. Discover publishing and guest-post opportunities

Fresh Alerts has to be one of the easiest ways to find distribution, publishing and guest-post opportunities for your content. Yes, high-quality guest posting, when combined with quality content and smart placement, remains a powerful tactic when integrated with other marketing opportunities.

For example, let’s say your subject is “dragons” and you want to find blogs that have posted guest posts in the past few days. You can simply create an alert for “dragons” AND “guest post”.

This alert will notify you whenever a new post is published mentioning both “guest post” and “dragons”.

This technique isn’t limited to guest posting, either. Getting creative, you could find other publishing opportunities for your specific niche.

The details

Starting now, we’ve made Fresh Alerts available to subscribers of Moz Analytics. If you’re not a PRO member, you can sign up for a 30-day trial to give them a spin if you’d like, which also includes access to our new Moz Analytics and full suite of inbound marketing tools.

Here’s what you need to know about Fresh Alerts:

• Activate up to 10 Alerts per Moz Analytics account
• When Fresh Web Explorer finds new mentions or links, you receive an email within 24 hours
• Alerts are sorted by Feed Authority, our new metric created specifically for FWE
• All advanced operators used by Fresh Web Explorer are available with Fresh Alerts

Have you tried Fresh Web Explorer already? If so, let us know your best ideas for Fresh Alerts in the comments below.

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