Google Alerts has been around for a long time. It’s a great way to keep up with comments about you and your firm on the web. It’s important to know what’s being said, both good and bad, as it happens. You might want to respond. At a minimum, you should know that something is happening out there.

It’s easy to use, and it’s free. It allows you to set up searches and have the results e-mailed on a schedule that you set (immediately, daily, or weekly). Set up searches for your name, the other attorneys in your firm, your firm’s name, and the URL of your firm’s website. Those alerts will keep you in the loop for most important comments. You’ll pick up news stories, blog posts, and comments on other sites about you.

In addition to keeping up with your name and your firm’s name, you should set up alerts for your competitors and your market. For instance, we have alerts for major family law attorneys in the markets we serve as well as alerts for terms like “Raleigh family law” so we can tell when people are writing things about those topics.

All you need to do to set up alerts is (1) visit Google Alerts, (2) input the search term you want to track, (3) select the alert frequency, (4) set the limit on the number of mentions in your alerts, and (5) input the e-mail address for the alerts. If you end up with more alert e-mails than you’d like, you can always go back and tweak your settings.

What are they saying about you? Hopefully it’s all good. With Google Alerts you’ll know for sure.