Time to read: 6 minutes
Are you looking to step up your link building game? While there are various methods of link building out there, such as directory submissions and more, there is one easy trick for finding link opportunities that requires minimal effort – unlinked brand mentions.
Finding Unlinked Mentions
Unlinked brand mentions are about as straight forward as they sound. They are instances of your business being mentioned in articles, blog posts, and in other sources all across the internet without an accompanying link to your website. When you claim them, they can be a tremendous help to your marketing.
To find unlinked mentions through Google, you can do an exact phrase search by putting quotation marks around your website URL and/or brand name in the search bar:
You will then see all the places on the web that you have been mentioned. Most of these results will be places you are probably already linked, however, there may be some hidden diamonds in the rough!
Other Ways to Find Unlinked Mentions
If you are looking for a quicker way to find unlinked brand mentions, there are a variety of paid tools, such as Ahrefs and SEMRush, that can do the work for you.
Here’s a breakdown of how you can work with these tools to manage your unlinked mentions:
Ahrefs
If you’re looking to keep track of who’s mentioning your business, you can set up an alert within Ahrefs. Within the “Alerts” section, create a new alert and follow these steps:
- In the search query field, enter your business names like this “Example” or “example” or “examples”
- In the blocked domains field, add your own website to avoid receiving alerts when mentioning your own business name
- Add the alert!
Tip: add misspellings of your business name so you don’t miss any
Moving forward, you’ll receive an email every time someone mentions your name. You can adjust the alerts to send an email daily, weekly, or whatever you prefer. Once you receive an email, you can review all of the pages mentioning your business and see if it makes sense to reach out to them.
SEMRush
Within this platform, you’ll want to utilize the Brand Monitoring tool. You’ll first go ahead and access the “Create brand query” area. Similar to Ahrefs, input your business name into the “Monitor this brand” field and make sure “exact match” is checked off. You can add as many keywords as necessary to track.
Further down in the query, you can also track backlinks by inputting the domain of your website in the “Track backlinks” field and checking off the news and blogs as the sources.
Click “create query” and you’re all set. Now, SEMRush will do the work for you, and you can begin tracking your unlinked mentions.
What to Do Once You’ve Found Unlinked Mentions
Once you have targeted various sources with unlinked mentions, all you need to do is then reach out to either the author of the article, the editor, or the webmaster, and ask for a link – it’s that simple.
Here is an example email that you can send:
Hi,
My name is _______ and I manage the ____ website. I noticed you mentioned my company on your website here: link to page where your company is mentioned
I was hoping you would be able to link to my business’ homepage somewhere on the page: link to the page you want a link for
I appreciate it. Thank you so much!
And it’s that simple. After a couple of days, if you don’t hear back, you can follow up.
Now, here is the tricky part. You may need to prepare for some rejection, because some websites may refuse you the link. And if that happens, you could always see if they would be interested in letting you contribute in some other way, like a testimonial or case study, that can help you get a backlink from their website.
Why Getting More Backlinks to Your Website Is Important
Google values websites that do their due diligence in maintaining a healthy web presence. Not only does website health include keeping content fresh and updated, but it also includes doing your part to get linked from other websites.
Having more quality links will help Google see your website’s value. If you have never performed link building before, we recommend starting off with some competitor analysis to scope out what businesses like yours are doing on the web.
To understand the value of backlinks and how they impact your website’s presence, check out these statistics and facts from our stats resource on link building:
- According to Backlinko, rankings on Google correlate with the number of sites that are linking to one specific page
- 94% of link builders expressed that the quality of links is valued more than the quantity of links gained
- It typically will take around three months to see the benefits of link building in terms of rankings
- Part of a successful link building strategy is also producing valuable content
- Websites that have 30-35 backlinks are seen to gain over 10,500 visits per month
- Pages that are ranking #1 in Google are seen to have 3.8x more backlinks than pages that are ranking below them
- 64% of digital marketers utilize guest posts as a tactic for link building
- Only 6.6% of websites that bought links saw increases in traffic
- 65% of experts in the digital marketing industry believe that the importance of links and how they affect rankings will increase in the next 5 years
Be Warned! The Secret Dangers of Link Building
Link building can be a very tedious task, and since it has great rewards when it comes to SEO you may be tempted to look for shortcuts to get more links to your website.
Sadly, search engines like Google have caught onto the black hat methods of SEO, including paying for links and getting links from spammy submission sites. So be sure to make your link building efforts clean and unique to avoid getting reprimanded for shady tactics.
Check Out More SEO Tips
Our blog is chock-full of great articles like this one that can help you step up your marketing efforts.
This post was origianlly posted in November 2019 and updated to reflect new information.
