Most business owners are aware that Google is a useful tool if someone is searching for your company on the web. However, what many people don't know is that you can also use Google to help build your credibility.

As a free service, the search engine offers something called Google Alerts, which will e-mail you with any articles, web pages, or news pages that happen to mention your company or you so you can keep track of what your local or national media is saying about you. The benefit to this, of course, is you can use these online articles and posts to show yourself in the spotlight providing more "proof" that you and your company are worthy of doing business with.

To sign up for this free service, simply go to Google Alerts, enter in your company name and e-mail address and click "create alert".

After you setup an alert for your own company, be sure to create an alert for each of your clients and competitors!