I’ve spent the last few posts in this series focusing on the mechanics of managing sales lead alerts with AlertRank. Now I thought I’d switch gears and make some suggestions on search terms for finding local sales leads. Here are ten of my favorite techniques to deliver more alerts and more relevant results.

1. Google News alerts can be targeted to a specific, local news source, like a newspaper or TV station with the source: operator. You must set the alert type to News. The key is replacing spaces in the source’s name with underscores.
new restaurant source:boston_globe

2. The location: operator is another Google News alert option. This will work with a city, state, or country name. Again, put underscores where there are spaces in the name.
new restaurant location:los_angeles

3. This one is so obvious that people often miss it. You can add a zipcode to a Web search, and get a lot of highly specific results. Don’t be misled into thinking that Google “knows” the zipcode of every story. It is just matching the numbers in the zipcode to pages that have that value in the text, but since stories about businesses often include the address, it can be very effective. I would include this type of search in addition to your other alerts to see if it picks up something extra.
new restaurant 90210

4. The site: operator lets you specify parts of a domain name, which leads to a useful trick for finding items about US state agencies. They generally use the pattern of [state].gov in their domain names. This also finds local municipalities, because they often have domain names with [city].[state].gov.
new restaurant site:ca.gov
new restaurant site:sunnyvale.ca.gov

5. When you start searching government sites for leads, you’ll quickly realize that a lot of official notices are posted online in PDF format. You can use the filetype: operator to get alerts on these.
new restaurant permit filetype:pdf

6. If you use Twitter for marketing, you’ll always be looking for new people to follow. Google Alerts can notify you when a new profile is created with your keywords and desired location.
intext:”bio * restaurant” intext:”location * florida” site:twitter.com

7. Most people don’t think of Flickr as a site for finding sales leads, but it is actually great for local leads, because people often identify the location in the photo’s description. You can also follow people on Flickr, and get a steady stream of leads for topics they are interested in.
new restaurant dallas site:flickr.com

8. Craigslist is another great source of local leads, as long as you know how to find pages for your location. The pattern to look for is site:craigslist.org inurl:[city]. The best thing about Craigslist alerts that they usually have to do with economic activity, such as hiring, which is a great sign that this is a hot lead.
new restaurant site:craigslist.org inurl:boston

9. Review sites will also deliver good local leads, and I’ve had great results with Yelp.com. This site likes to put the location in the title of the review, so that is where you should look for it with the intitle: operator.
new restaurant intitle:”san francisco” site:yelp.com

10. When it comes to B2B sales leads, Linkedin.com can’t be beat. This is the best place I’ve found for leads to local trade associations and consultants.
restaurant california site:linkedin.com

The biggest weakness of Google Alerts as a lead generation tool is a total absence of reporting capabilities. The best you can do is forward individual emails, which is not a very effective way to share leads with your sales team. AlertRank adds a set of powerful Google alert reporting tools, including getting results as an Excel spreadsheet or PDF file.

Daily Excel summary

AlertRank automatically collects all the alerts you receive each 24 hours into an excel spreadsheet, and emails it to you every morning. Here is the spreadsheet I got this morning from the example grillalerts account.

The nice thing about getting this as an Excel file is that you can easily delete items, or add notes to others before emailing it to the sales staff. You can also control which alerts appear in the spreadsheet, or turn off delivery completely with the delivery settings page.

Daily PDF summary

AlertRank also delivers a PDF version of the alerts from the previous 24 hours each morning by email. This is a convenient format for sharing the alerts with clients or investors. Each alert in the PDF file has a link to the original page found by Google. Here is today’s PDF report for the grillalerts account.

The PDF summary has its own delivery settings page that has the same controls as the one for the Excel summary. You can control which types of alerts are delivered, and turn off the delivery with this page.

Custom PDF reporting

If you want even more control over your reports, you can open the Alerts Listing page, and select the print to PDF option. When you combine this with all the sorting, searching and selection options this page provides, you can create a highly customized report.

Here is a sample PDF report I created by customizing the columns displayed, sorting the results on Google PageRank, and selecting only those alerts for the search term “(renovate OR remodel) restaurant”.

Now that you know how to manage alerts more effectively, the next post in this series gives you my favorite tips for finding local sales leads with Google Alerts.

Managing multiple Google Alerts effectively is the key to extracting the best sales leads from the results Google sends you. AlertRank is designed to take over this management process from your email program. This post will cover the major features of the alerts listing page, where you will spend most of your time when using the site.

Search within your alerts
You can create highly specific search terms when you create your alerts, but then you could miss a lot of results. I find it better to create general searches, and then use the search within AlertRank to pull out the results I need. For example, instead of creating alerts for different cities, I created general alerts on new and remodeled restaurants. Now that I have the alerts, I can search for any city I want to work with. This is not going back to Google for the search. It’s just selecting the matching items within the alerts I have received.

Select by date
By default, AlertRank shows you all the alerts for the last 30 days, sorted with the most recent first. You can click on the date control to isolate a specific range of alerts by date.

Select by alert properties
When you click on the settings control, you get a wide range of selection options. You can choose just those alerts that came from Google News, allow commenting, and have a minimum Alertrank quality score, among other options.

These choices can be combined with a date range and search to let you pull out exactly the sales leads you need.

Custom column display
The alerts listing displays the most commonly used properties of each alert, but you can click the Customize Columns link to display a list of additional columns you want to see.

This choice of columns will become your new default, and will be shown whenever you use the site.

You can hide any of these columns with the same pulldown menu, and also set the display back to the original column settings.

Sort by alert properties
The listing is normally sorted by date received, but if you click any column heading, the list will be sorted by that column. Clicking the heading again reverses the order. I like to sort the alerts by the AlertRank quality score, so I can see the most important alerts at the top.

Setting the sentiment for each alert
The first column in the alerts listing is used to display the sentiment rating for each alert. This allows you to rate the alerts as positive or negative. This is done by clicking within this column. Some monitoring products try to judge the sentiment for you through textual analysis, but that generally depends on simplistic searches for words like “love” and “hate.” We explored this idea when building AlertRank, but soon realized that this doesn’t give the user enough control. When it comes to sales leads, you know best how to decide whether an alert is good or bad for your business. So you make the choice, and then as we’ll see later, AlertRank uses the setting in many ways.

Recording the alerts you’ve read
AlertRank knows which alerts you’ve read, just like an email program or feed reader.

It keeps track of when you click an alert to view its page, and then removes the bold face from the alert’s title to tell you that you’ve read this.

You can use the settings panel at any time to select just those alerts that you haven’t read. You can also reset the read status, if you want to keep this alert with the ones you haven’t read yet.

Deleting alerts
You can delete alerts individually, or select multiple alerts and delete them all at once.

The alerts trash listing will retain all the deleted alerts, so you can review them, and restore any that you change your mind about.

Learn how to share all the alerts you find with AlertRank in the next post in this series.

The catch-22 of Google Alerts is that the more results they deliver, the more they get in the way. This sample account is already getting 15 alerts a day, and that is with just 3 search terms. When you start following dozens of search terms, you could be receiving hundreds of alert emails a day. That is not a manageable number. AlertRank gives you lots of ways of controlling this flood of emails, and even allows you to turn off the emails entirely while still receiving alerts.

The email settings in AlertRank are found in the Alerts Management tab. Within this section of the product there is a separate page of settings for each of AlertRank’s delivery methods. Here is the email delivery page.

1. The first option lets you turn off email delivery completely. If you choose the Do Not Send option, you can still read all the alerts within the AlertRank website.

2. You can restrict the alerts you receive by email to those with a minimum AlertRank quality score. The higher the score, the more influential the alert’s source. So if you only want to see the hottest leads, set the minimum to a value of 6 or 7.

3. By default alerts for all the search terms are sent by email, but this control gives you the choice of receiving alerts for only specific keywords.

4. The final group of settings is based on properties of the pages found in the alert. These options are marketing and SEO related, and are useful if you want to leave comments on pages found in alerts to increase traffic to your site.

Regardless of how you limit your email delivery, all the alerts sent by Google will always be retained in your account on the AlertRank website. The next installment shows you how to slice and dice alerts within the AlertRank site.

The basic idea behind AlertRank is that it evaluates your alerts before they reach you, and adds ranking information that tells you which are most important. It also collects the alerts in a simple Web interface that lets you manage and report on them.

Create an AlertRank Account

The first step is easy. Just go to the AlertRank signup page, and supply a username and password that you want to use. You also need to tell us your email address, so we can send the alerts along to you after processing them.

For this demonstration we’ll use the example of a restaurant supply company that wants to find sales leads for its line of professional grill products. The sales manager already has an email address of grillsupply@gmail.com, so this will be the ultimate destination for the Google Alerts. The AlertRank account will be called grillalerts. When the account is created, an email address is automatically set up called grillalerts@alertrank.com. The way this will work, is that we’ll tell Google Alerts to send email results to grillalerts@alertrank.com. AlertRank will process them, and send the improved emails to grillsupply@gmail.com. Once everything is in place, the sales manager can continue using his normal email system on Gmail to read the alerts. He’ll also be able to work with the alerts through the AlertRank website.

Create a Google Account

The easiest way to tell Google to send alerts to this new AlertRank account is to create an account on Google with the AlertRank email address. Google Alerts created in this account will go to AlertRank first, which will do all the work of annotating them and passing them along to the user’s mailbox.

Create the Google Alerts

Once we are logged into the new Google account, we can create the first set of alerts. One of the best ways to find sales leads for a business is to look for new businesses or ones that are renovating. There are many possible searches that could find leads, but we’ll start with three simple ones:

• (new OR opening) restaurant
• (renovate OR remodel) restaurant
• allinurl: restaurant contact

A single Google Alerts account allows you to have up to 1,000 different searches, so over time, we can add more to this list. This will be covered in later parts of this series of posts. If you aren’t familiar with Google Search syntax, I have a complete tutorial on creating alerts and the tricks of Google’s syntax available. Also, when you create an AlertRank account, I will send you a link to my e-book with even more Google Alerts tips.

Read your first AlertRank email

Here is the first email to be delivered in response to these searches. It looks similar to the type of email you would receive directly from Google Alerts, but Alertrank’s version has a number of improvements. The alerts all have an AlertRank quality score attached. This is a number from 0 to 10 that tells you how influential the source of this alert is. For example, an alert from The New York Times has a rank of 10, which means it’s highly influential, while an alert from a news paper in Prattville, Alabama has a rank of 5. The alerts are listed in order from highest to lowest rank. This lets you focus on the most valuable alerts first.

The quality score is mainly used for online marketing purposes. If you want to promote your services through commenting on the sites found by the alerts, it is important to know which ones have more influence and readers. Even if you aren’t going to post comments on these alerts, it is clear that a business that is written up in The New York Times is going to be a bigger potential customer.

Review alerts on the AlertRank website
The major benefits of using AlertRank become clear when you log into your account on the website. Each account has a complete management interface that collects the alerts, and lets you sort, search, and report on them.

The next installment in this series demonstrates how the AlertRank site gives you a tremendous amount of control over the lead generation process with Google Alerts.

Let’s take the public Google Alerts account I created for the food author Michael Pollan as an example. These alerts are sent to a Twitter account, and have generated a good list of followers. The auto-twitter page for this account on AlertRank shows you the different ways you can control which alerts are tweeted.

1. Add a hashtag to the end of each tweet to help people find it with a Twitter search tool. You can add as much text as you want here, and AlertRank will automatically trim the alert to make sure the total tweet is within 140 characters.
2. Use the AlertRank quality score to control the importance of the alerts you tweet. The AlertRank score is based on Google PageRank and a collection of other influence factors. The higher the AlertRank, the more influential the source of the alert is.
3. Select the search terms to include in your tweets. You can collect alerts from up to 1,000 search terms in a single AlertRank account, but you can limit the tweets to just the terms you want.
4. Restrict tweets to those alerts with the right page features. For example, if you want to only tweet alerts that allows comments or trackbacks, you can set these options on. That gives you a set of tweets that are suited for a blog outreach campaign.
5. Depending on the amount of alerts you get in your account, you can restrict the number of tweets to a maximum per hour and per day.

The best part is that all of this tweeting is automatic. Since the accounts on AlertRank are free, you can create multiple accounts, each with their own search terms and levels of auto-tweeting control.

We have a lot of improvements planned for AlertRank, and even though it is free, it will continue to grow in response to user requests. So check it out, and let me know if you want anything else added.

All you have to do is follow Google’s advice and focus your blog commenting on those sites that you get in Google Alerts. If Google sees links to your pages from these sites, it will assume that you too are authoritative for these keywords. Repeat this often enough, and soon you’ll also be showing up in Google Alerts.

The same thing applies to social media monitoring with Google Alerts. Along with tracking your company and product names, you should also have alerts for any common terms in your industry, and breaking news events that will affect your customers. These will give you the opportunity to be a participant in social media, rather than being just an observer.

Alpert got a good bounce when he announced, but his rate of mentions have declined since, and the last week has been pretty much flatlined. I plan on exploring Alpert’s current online visibility, and putting together a plan for generating a little more buzz. This will take more work than I can cover in one blog post, so I’m going to make this my focus for the rest of this week.

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the overall picture. The analytics page displays a summary of the total and daily average rate of mentions for all the current Google Alerts in this account. By clicking the total mention column, we can order them from highest to lowest to see how Dodd mentions compare to those for Alpert.

It looks like Dodd is getting about 5 times more mentions each than Alpert, So there is a lot of work to be done. In the next post we’ll analyze the sources of these alerts and see if there are some good sites for the Alpert people to run a commenting campaign.