According to Wikepedia Google alerts are;

Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service, offered by the search engine company Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user's search term(s).

It can be used to help you monitor who is talking about your business or organisation  across the internet. This will then allow you to quickly engage your customers and reviewers as well. The notification service tracks mentions related to your business or brand and can potentially unveil opportunities for link building, brand building, collaborations, and more.  It is also a tool that is well-suited to beginners.

Google Alerts can be set up here, they can be used to monitor anything, luckily you can also set the frequency of alerts so that your are not bombarded by notifications.

You will need to set up a search term you wish to track. Google Alerts will display a results preview as you type. Options will allow you choose the frequency of notifications and the source of alerts such as blogs, news,web, and if you are unsure it can be set to automatic. Regional settings can also be selected such as language and region. Further refinements can be made to select "all results" or "only the best results" When all options have been set up select 'create alert'

What things should be Monitored

Monitor your competitors

Check on what your competitors do  can unveil marketing tactics that you can use in your business.

Maybe they’re doing lots of guest posting, heavily promoting their content, or even buying links! We always advise against buying links as this can adversly affect your search rankings.  Our SEO services include competitior analysis so we can assist on finding new opportunties that your rivals are not using and target existing ones.

Guest post opportunities

Identify blogs that share topics that align with your business, and pitch article at them which would link back to your site. Bear in mind that those sites often have people pictching for guest articles. We seem to have people contacting us on a daily basis about writing a guset post. Unfortunatley, most of the ideas we recieve are poorly concieved and not that orginal.

Monitor questions in your niche

Answering industry-related questions can help to establish yourself as an expert in your field. In turn, this helps to build trust amongst potential customers. As well as using Alerts, try anwsing questions in a forum such as Quora.com. 

what are your competitors are publishing

Most businesses will publish new blog content on a regular basis, including your competitors. Which has the benefit of creating brand interest and improve search engine rankings.

Keeping an eye on what the competition is putting out there can help you to discover new topic ideas for your blog, and also possibly idendify unique ideas for your business's blog.

What Problems are there using Google Alerts

Google Alerts is not able to monitor all areas of data, i.e. social media such as facebook and by tracking social media, you will see:

• Quick reviews and first impressions of your products
• Questions and comments from people needing your help
• Honest, immediate thoughts from your customers

And these days, social media updates are usually the first source of news.

also not all the notifications are accurate and there seems to be valuable information that is sometimes missing from notifications.