Independent book stores have a tremendous challenge in a market dominated by Amazon. The best of them compete by sticking to a few well defined niches, and running regular events with authors and members of the local community. They also keep their staff and regular customers well informed about the books appearing in their areas of interest. This public Google Alerts account gives you an idea of how alerts can be used to support the business of Harvard Book Store in Harvard Square. Despite its name and URL of Harvard.com, this store is not a part of Harvard University, but it is right across the street from Harvard Yard. It has a wide range of books, but the areas of strongest focus are politics, philosophy and religion. For some reason, the store also maintains a copy of its site at HarvardBookStore.com. This makes little sense from an SEO standpoint, since it splits Google’s attention.
This account is not meant to be exhaustive, but it does demonstrate the type of alerts you should be creating if you manage a book store or are responsible for book store marketing for clients. If you aren’t familiar with the search syntax used in these alerts, you can review our Google Alerts Tutorial. These search terms would be used to monitor the store’s reputation, learn about new books, and provide news stories that can be distributed to customers as part of their marketing.
Store’s name and location
“harvard book store”
(”1256 massachusetts avenue” OR “1256 mass ave”) cambridge
“harvard square”
Store’s website
site:harvard.com
site:harvardbookstore.com
Find out when Google has indexed a new page on the site.
link:harvard.com -site:harvard.com
link:harvardbookstore.com -site:harvardbookstore.com
View all inbound links
Store events
“harvard book store” site:flickr.com
“harvard book store” site:meetup.com
“harvard book store” site:youtube.com
(event OR “book reading” OR “author reading” OR “book signing”) “harvard book store”
Store reviews
“harvard book store” site:amazon.com
“harvard book store” site:librarything.com
“harvard book store” site:twitter.com
“harvard book store” site:yelp.com
Store news stories
“harvard book store” location:boston
“harvard book store” source:boston_globe
Book news for staff and customers
(new OR “best selling” OR bestselling) (politics OR political) book
(new OR “best selling” OR bestselling) philosophy book
(new OR “best selling” OR bestselling) religion book
Competitor
“harvard coop”
site:thecoop.com
link:thecoop.com -site:thecoop.com
Here is the account now in AlertRank. It’s been running for about 3 days, and there are already more than 70 alerts.
You can see that this can be expanded to hundreds of different searches, but Google lets you create 1,000 search terms in a single account, and AlertRank makes it easy to manage them.
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