The Internet is filled with review sites that let people share their experiences with individual businesses. Are you tracking them to make sure you can react to any negative mentions? That may sound like a huge task, but Google Alerts makes it easy. Best of all, the results will come right to you automatically by email. You don’t even have to remember to fit extra Google searches into your busy day.
Here is the basic idea demonstrated with the Yelp.com review site, although the same approach can be taken for just about any online site that publishes consumer reviews. I don’t want to pick on an individual small business, so we can try this trick out with Trader Joe’s. I can tell Google to only look in the Yelp.com website by including site:yelp.com in my Google Alerts search. It’s also best to leave out characters like apostrophes and quotes when doing a Google search.
trader joes site:yelp.com
This gives me national results, but by adding the name of any city in the US I can narrow the results down:
trader joes boston site:yelp.com
Now you can read all the customer reviews for Trader Joe’s in the Boston area. I can get even more specific with town and state name:
trader joes needham ma site:yelp.com
But what if you only have time to read the negative comments? You can add words to any search that identify a negative review. This takes another Google Alerts trick. To ask for results that could include any one of a list of words, you have to combine them with OR and put them all in parentheses. In our case we’ll add these words (hate OR worst OR sucks OR terrible). Also, Google requires you to capitalize the OR:
trader joes needham ma (hate OR worst OR sucks OR terrible) site:yelp.com
There you go. Now you can customize any of these searches with your own business name and location, and create a Google Alert for them.
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