Add this phenomenal power tool to your daily delivery of Google news/update email alerts - then just stand back and watch it fly. Alert Rank immediately goes to work gathering, sorting, and annotating for you.
All you have to do is review the neat, easy-to-read reports as they arrive.
It couldn't be simpler!
Adding a city name to your Google Alerts search terms is one way to do local searching, but there are lots of tricks that can be even more targeted. For these examples, let's use the case of a marketing person for a knitting supplies store in Boston who wants to build a list of local contacts.
Craigslist breaks down its pages by city, so as long as you limit your alert to the right URL, you will only get alerts for that location:
(knit OR knitting OR yarn) site:boston.craigslist.org
The URLs for Flickr's user profile pages follow the pattern of flickr.com/people, so searching for this type of URL with the right keywords, a location name, and the site: operator will let you find users to contact:
(knit OR knitting OR yarn) boston site:flickr.com/people
Meetup.com is a great way to find local networking opportunities. You can set up alerts for specific states with the pattern meetup.com/cities/us/[state]. Searching within these URLs will notify you when new group pages are created:
(knit OR knitting OR yarn) site:meetup.com/cities/us/ma
News alerts have two special operators that can be used to create local alerts. You can use these alerts to find people in this area. The source: operator allows you to request alerts from a specific newspaper, TV, or radio station. The one trick to be aware of is to substitute the underscore character where there is a space in the source's name:
(knit OR knitting OR yarn) source:boston_globe
The other operator you can use to create local news alerts is location:. This lets you specify a city, state or country for the alerts:
(knit OR knitting OR yarn) location:boston
