This is the fifth installment in a series of blog posts on generating sales leads with Google Alerts. If you missed the first post in this series, you can find it here.
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
Related Posts
- Google Alerts for Sales Leads, Part 3: Managing Multiple Alerts
- Google Alerts for Sales Leads, Part 2: Stopping Email Overload
- Google Alerts for Sales Leads, Part 1: Create Alerts
- Google Alerts for Sales Leads, Part 4: Alert Reports
- Deliver Google Alerts leads to your sales team
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