Quick Ways to Find Brand Mentions

Website owners should look for every opportunity possible to get backlinks to their website.

When other websites reference your company, website, or brand, perhaps as a source or in a quote, they are required to list you as a source – they mention your brand or give you a brand mention.

However, in many cases, these websites won’t initially add a link to your website. This is a missed opportunity for a backlink and is known as a brand mention.

In this guide, you will learn:

• What unlinked brand mentions are
• The benefits of mentions for SEO
• How to leverage them into a scalable, white-hat backlink strategy

What Are Brand Mentions?

Brand mentions are a type of backlink and occur when your brand name or website is mentioned in a different website, blog comments, social media posts or document, without linking to your website.

They occur when a person from your organization either gives a quote and a website references that quote, or when your website contains information that someone else wants to reference and includes your brand name but doesn’t hyperlink your website.

Brand mentions are an important part of a company’s online presence and reputation, as they are used to build individual authority for C-suite executives of a brand and reputation management.

They are similar to word-of-mouth recommendations when your brand or company name might arise in daily conversation – but the beauty of them originating in an online discussion is that there is an opportunity to use your brand name as anchor text and link to your website as the original source. They can be a cheaper alternative to buying links.

Other potential unlinked brand mentions include any unique brand product or service you offer and even your brand representatives.

How to Turn Brand Mentions Into Backlinks (in 3 steps)

Remember that brand mentions are free, and most times, they are unlinked. So if you want to turn them into backlinks, follow these simple steps:

Step 1

Ask your customers to mention your brand on their website or blog, and then kindly ask them to insert a backlink on your brand name.

Step 2

Search online for mentions of your brand or representatives of your organization to find other mentions of your company.

If you find unlinked brand mentions, reach out to the owners and editors of these websites, introducing yourself as the unlinked brand owner, and kindly requesting a backlink.

Step 3

Later in this article, we’ll go through several steps you can use to find these unlinked brand mentions, and then how you go about turning them into a backlink.

Brand Mentions Link Examples

As mentioned, a brand mention is any time your brand name occurs in online or social media platform content, without a backlink to your brand’s website.

This looks something like this:

However, at Loganix, we’re well aware of the opportunity that unlinked brand mentions offer as potential backlinks, so when we find other websites mentioning our brand, we reach out to them and request they give us a backlink.

And in most cases, this is the end result:

Source: UserP

Benefits of Brand Mentions

There are several benefits to converting brand mentions into backlinks. These include:

• Relevant anchor text. Because the anchor text is directly related to your brand or website (it is the very name), then these links carry a high degree of link relevance, increasing their link juice.
• The links will come from already established web pages. Once content is published online, it takes some time for search engines and Google’s web crawlers to index and categorize that content. Once this is done, these webpages are assigned value reactive to the domain they’re hosted on, and how relevant they are to other websites in their same niches. Getting an editor or website owner to insert a backlink after a page is published, also called an editorial backlink or contextual backlinks carries more immediate SEO weight than directly publishing new content for backlinks, such as guest posts.
• Little if any financial input. It doesn’t cost anything to search from brand mentions online and then manually reach out to website owners requesting they hyperlink your mention.

One of the only drawbacks to brand mentions as a link-building strategy is the time it takes to search for brand mentions, find the contact information for the webmasters and editors at those websites, then write a personalized outreach email requesting a backlink.

This time sink means some smaller businesses with limited resources and workflow constraints might find brand mentions to be an overly time-consuming marketing strategy and backlink-building strategy.

How To Turn (Unlinked) Brand Mentions into Links

When you start an unlinked brand mention backlinking campaign, begin by creating a list of every possible anchor text keyword related to your brand, company, website, representatives, products, and services.

For example, at Loganix, we’re a link-building service with Aaron Haynes as our CEO, Adam Steele as our COO, and Sarah Jane Ross as our Director of Operations. We also have several free SEO tools, such as the Loganix Free Domain Authority Checker Tool, Loganix SEO Templates, and Loganix Referral Spam Tool.

This means that our list of potential unlinked brand mentions might include:

• Loganix
• Loganix Free Domain Authority Checker Tool
• Loganix SEO Templates
• Loganix Referral Spam Tool
• Aaron Hayes
• Adam Steele
• Sarah Jane Ross

Anytime a website editor mentions one of these keywords, there is a potential for them to insert a backlink back to our site. We need to find these keywords, then contact the website owners and request they give us a link.

It’s important to consider that not all keyword anchors are worth pursuing, even if they might be related to your brand, products, or services.

These include services that aren’t unique to your brand. To continue with the Loganix example:

We help other businesses, both individuals and agencies, earn backlinks through a variety of different channels.

This includes:

• Guest Posting
• SEO Packages
• SEO Audits
• Google Ads Management
• Backlink Gap Analysis

Now, while we do offer all of these services, there are also thousands of other SEO agencies offering the same thing. As such, when a webmaster or editor mentions these services in an article, they probably aren’t referring to Loganix (unless they include our brand name as well).

So, while we do offer these services with our brand, pursuing brand mentions from these keywords will likely not be a fruitful pursuit, as it isn’t uniquely relevant to our brand.

Make sure you only pursue unlinked brand mentions that are unique to your organization in order to optimize your efforts and ROI. Also, only follow unlinked mentions on quality pages. You’ll be surprised how much content syndication and replication occurs on low-quality websites, and you really only want to get brand mentions and brand awareness from sites that will positively impact your brand reputation, as well as your backlink profile.

How To Find Target Anchor Text And Unlinked Brand Mentions

There are several different ways you can find unlinked brand mentions. Here, we’ll discuss two methods, one which includes paid tools, the other which is freely available but more complex.

1. Ahrefs Content Explorer

A highly effective way of finding unlinked brand mentions, Ahrefs content explorer is a mini search engine that you can set many filters on.

Using this method, restrict your results to English pages with a DR or 20+, and say these sites need a minimum organic traffic value of 50:

Then, export these results and eliminate all the pages that already link to your website using a Screaming Frog customer search Regex feature:

Then, take the content URLs from your Content Explorer exported CSV files, paste them into Screaming Frog, select the “custom” tab, and select the “Does not contain” filter we created. This will then show us all the pages we found in Content Explorer that mention our brand name but don’t include a backlink.

Then, it’s a matter of clicking through the results, visiting the webpage, looking for high backlink quality potential brand mentions, and contacting the editor at that website directly. Later, we’ll go over 3 tried-and-tested ways to find anyone’s email address.

1. Use a Google Search

Depending on the size of your brand, Google will possibly return hundreds of thousands of brand mentions. As such, using filters, such as dates, is a useful way to limit the number of results into a more manageable list.

You could click through each result, use the “find (Ctrl+F)” feature, search your brand, assess the quality, and do manual outreach. This works – but is incredibly labor-intensive.

Instead, you could scrape the results from Google using Chris Ainsworth’s scraper tool. Then, paste these URLs into your Screaming Frog custom search SEO Spider, or use Scrapebox’s free link checker tool.

Manual Outreach To Switch Unlinked Brand Mentions To Backlinks

Once you’ve found and vetted unlinked brand mentions, it’s time to reach out to these website owners and request they add a link to your site.

The best way to do this is from a humanist angle, saying that you’re thrilled they found your product, service, or insight useful, you’re glad they mentioned you, and that it would be an incredible help if they added in a link which gave you full credit as the source.

Our top tips include:

• Approach with humility. Remember, you’re dealing with a person who will ultimately decide whether or not they want to give you a free backlink. Being friendly but not overly familiar and simply stating how much getting a backlink from their site will help yours is your best shot at appealing to their softer side.
• Only request links when it’s relevant. In some cases, you’ll find mentions of your brand that have no real context. In these cases, it’s often not even worth the effort to craft a personalized email. Choose your marks wisely to optimize your ROI from branded link building, and be sure to select opportunities with worthwhile link building metrics that align with your link building plan.
• Offer additional value. In your outreach email, try and give as much as you can in value without seeming smug. Perhaps you noticed a typo or a mistake on the webpage and can helpfully point this out. Be genuine.
• Include the unlinked text. Making it as easy as possible for the editor to help you maximizes your chances of them doing so. So, include the URL to the page, include the sentence with the brand mention, and include the URL you’d like them to link to. If you give them this information, they can literally link to you in under a minute.

Brand Mentions FAQs

Do unlinked mentions help SEO?

Yes. Unlinked mentions help SEO. A backlink from a published website is more powerful than a backlink from a blog post, and once you refine your brand mention outreach strategy, it can return beneficial results for free and with minimal time input.

How can I improve my brand mentions?

Reach out to sites that previously mentioned you, and ask your previous customers to mention you on their websites—doing this with tact and relevancy, however. Also, you can use press release platforms to get more brand mentions and handle your brand reputation.

Why brand mentions are important?

A key factor of search engine rankings is the number of high‐quality inbound links pointing to your website. When you find content that mentions your brand, ask the author to link to your website. If they accept, then you have found an opportunity for backlink creation. The more brand mentions you have, the more backlink opportunities you have as well.

Brand mentions are also good for cultivating a positive online brand image. Social media marketing, content marketing, and brand monitoring tools can all be useful when working on real-time social listening and sentiment analysis to create the best brand image possible for your company.

How do you increase brand mentions on social media?

On social media, the goal of backlink creation is to increase brand mentions and engagement. For example, say you want to increase the number of Google+ followers for your company.

A few ways to achieve this:

Ask questions on your Google+ page and reply with tweets that include a link to your website. Publish content on your company’s blog and share it with friends and colleagues who may also find it useful or interesting.

SUMMARY

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of brand mentions, how you can find them, and how you can turn them into backlinks for your website.

We’ve included different strategies for discovering brand mention opportunities, and we also offer the service here at Loganix. To learn more about our services and how we can help you outsource link building, please contact us today.