Legal Marketing Tip: Stay On Top of Legal Chatter With Google Alerts

For any lawyer starting to dabble in the world of online legal marketing and blogging,  Google Alerts is an invaluable tool for keeping up with online legal chatter.

Basically, this program allows Google to “alert” you any time a particular word or phrase is mentioned on the web or in the blogosphere.

I’m going to explain how to set this up in a minute, but first lets discuss some useful and practical ways to utilize Google Alerts for your law practice.

First and foremost, Google Alerts is great  reputation management tool. Law firms should always set up an alert with their company name and name of each attorney to monitor what people are saying online regarding your business or or personal brand.

Google Alerts is also a great way to keep up on breaking news within your particular practice area. For example, a products liability lawyer may set up an alert on the words “FDA recall” for an instant notification the minute a recall hits the web.

And obviously, the quicker a lawyer knows about these breaking stories, the quicker they can start “quick strike” campaigns to grab some of the clients that may have been affected by the recalled product.

Finally, Google Alerts are great way to find relevent blog topics.  For example, an estate planning attorney may set up an alert on “lost assets” or “poor legal planning” to find stories across the web of people that may have faired differently with proper estate planning or some of your services.

So now that we’ve discussed some of the ways to properly use Google Alerts, the following is a brief tutorial on how to get  set up.

Step 1: Log into your Google Account. Do this by going to http://www.google.comand signing in at the top right hand side of the page. If you don’t have a Google account, you will need to create one to sign up for Google Alerts.

Step 2:Once you login, click on “Alerts” under “My Products” on the main dashboard.

Step 3:Enter your desired term in the “search term” box. Then choose how often you want to receive the notifications (once a day, as it happens, etc) and make sure the alert will be delivered to the proper gmail address. *Note: use quotation marks on your alerts to keep specific words together– such as “medical malpractice” in the image shown below

Step 4: Hit “create alert” and you’re all done! Now just sit back and wait for the notifications to start hitting your inbox!

Online Business Manager and law firm marketing expert, Laura Lee Sparks, is one of the most authoritative and well respected voices on attorney outsourcing, legal marketing and being a virtual assistant for lawyers on the web.  Her advice and legal marketing campaigns have helped lawyers reach and surpass the million-dollar mark in their businesses numerous times thanks to her straight-forward advice and ability to make legal marketing principles easy to understand and implement.  For further information on lawyer outsourcing programs or to contact Laura Lee directly, please email help@legalmarketingmaven.com