How to Improve Your Backlink Profile Through Unlinked Brand Mentions

While link building can take precious time and resources, there’s a simple way you can build your backlink profile—without taking over your whole to-do list. Try pursuing unlinked brand mentions. It’s a low-effort, high-impact, and a totally white-hat SEO tactic.

Why is link building important for SEO?

Before we dive headfirst into how you can pursue unlinked brand mentions, let’s take a step back. Why should you even take the time to create link building campaigns? Good question.

1) Quality backlinks = higher rankings

The equation is really that simple. The more backlinks your company gains from reputable sites, the higher you will rank on the search engine results page (SERP). Your domain and page authorities will also increase as your backlink profile increases.

2) Your referral traffic increases

If the sites that are linking to you are high-quality and relevant to your own business, chances are sales will increase as well. Readers that are engaged and interested in the content of the linker’s page can click to your page and potentially even convert.

3) Relationships are built

Although the simple answer to why you are reaching out to a brand or company is to gain a link, this can also become the bridge to a new relationship with relevant sites within your industry. It’s a great way to gain trust from these websites through continuous outreach. And all it took was a link!

Now that you’ve been briefed on why link building is important, it’s time to delve into how you can pursue valuable backlinks through—drumroll, please—unlinked brand mentions.  

So, what exactly are unlinked brand mentions?

To put it simply, unlinked brand mentions are when a website, company, or individual has mentioned, utilized, or discussed your brand online within their blog post, web page, or overall page content, without giving your brand a follow link to your website.

Gaining these mentions as links are a lot easier than one may think, and it only takes a few steps to reach out.

Where can I find them?

There are multiple locations where you can find your company’s mentions. These include but are not limited to:

• Google Search: Easily search for brand mentions (for free!) in Google Search by following this search query structure: “keyword/brand name/person name” -ownsite.com -twitter.com -facebook.com -google.com. Below is an example of how this should look:

• Ahrefs Alerts: This tool crawls news, blogs, and forums and helps you find all mentions of your brand on the internet.
• Moz Fresh Web Explorer: Similar to Ahrefs Alerts, the Fresh Web Explorer can analyze the mentions and links to your company, competitors, and targeted keywords.

How should I reach out?

So you’ve found a laundry list of web pages that are mentioning your brand (all praises, of course), without the coveted follow link. Now what?

First, prioritize the pages that are most valuable to your brand. The websites that are relevant, respected, and high-quality should be focused on first.

From there, write a short and concise email to send to the Webmasters. Make sure to avoid an extremely vague and robot-like template. More often than not, they will link to your brand since they have already mentioned it. If they do hesitate, simply move onto the next opportunity on your list.

Lastly, make sure to check the sites you have reached out to a few days later. Although they may not have responded to your email, they could have already implemented the change. Say thank you and remember, this could be the beginning of a new industry relationship!

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Need more advice on how to pursue your unlinked brand mentions? Send us a tweet at @Perfect_Search.