At this point, it’s safe to conclude that Google and other search engines value inbound links. There have been numerous patents related this topic, countless articles discussing the importance of links and many case studies on the value of inbound links. With that said, we will proceed as if our readers understand the value of a link, what constitutes a good link vs. bad link and what backlink should look like in order to appear “natural”.
What Are Unlinked Brand Mentions?
Unlinked brand mentions are specific references to your brand, services, or products. These mentions (or citations) show up in product reviews, forums, blog posts, news articles, social media posts, partner websites (think companies your company has partnered with or done business with where they might mention your company) or other types of content commonly found on the web. When your brand, service or product is mentioned, it is in the form of text, with no accompanying hyperlink, hence the label “Unlinked” brand mention”.
Many of our readers have certainly searched for their first and last names in Google with an interest in seeing the results. Searching for brand mentions is no different. Simply go to Google, type in your brand name or proprietary product or service and see what comes up. Those are brand mentions. Is the mention of your brand listed in simple text, with no accompanying link? Yes? Well, that is an unlinked brand mention.
Brand mentions can be both positive or negative. We are going to focus on positive mentions of your brand, service or product for this exercise. There are opportunities to deal with/take advantage of negative references to your brand, and this will be discussed in a future blog post related to reputation management.
How to Find Unlinked Brand Mentions / Monitoring for Unlinked Brand Mentions?
As we mentioned in the opening paragraph, unlinked brand mentions can be references to not only your brand, but your services or products. Using Google as an example, words like “Google”, “Gmail”, “Google Analytics”, “AdWords” and “Search Console” are what we would consider to be brand mentions.
Here at Objective Marketing, we use both manual and automated processes (tools) to find unlinked brand mentions. While using automated processes, keep in mind, there will always be a human element involved (think along the lines of confirming the mention of your brand and evaluating the quality/sentiment of the mention).
With the above said, let’s breakdown both manually finding brand mentions and automating the process using tools:
Manually Searching for Unlinked Brand Mentions
Using Google, simply search for your brand, product or services, review the results and look for instances of your brand being mentioned. Depending on the size of your brand and mentions of your brand, there is the possibility of 100s or even 1000s of results. Using Google’s Advanced Search Operators can help you eliminate or include certain references to your brand (think along the lines of excluding Twitter, for example), but this is still going to be a major undertaking. Our recommendation is to explore the multitude of tools, both free and paid, that focus on automating the finding of unlinked brand mentions, which brings us to:
Automating the Search for Unlinked Brand Mentions
Searching Google for “brand mentions tools” brings up 1000’s of results. Here at Objective Marketing, we have used many of the top tools you will see listed. Each tool brings something different to the table, many have a monthly subscription fee. We actually have a favorite tool and it is 100% free to use. That tool? RankTank’s “Unlinked Brand Mention Finder”. RankTank’s tool is described as, “A tool to check Google search results for unlinked brand mentions, built into a Google Doc. It looks at the top 100 Google web search results, opens each page, extracts all links from each page, and checks each one for a link to the domain in question.” The instructions for RankTank’s tool are clear and concise, “Set the domain of the brand you are interested in monitoring mentions for. Set the Google query to an unlinked mention type query (i.e. the company’s brand or product name in quotes). This will check the top 100 results by default. Use the “results” field to specify the number of results to return.” The result? A refined list of unlinked brand mentions you and your team are ready to outreach to.
How to Outreach to Unlinked Brand Mentions?
By this point, you should have compiled a list of unlinked brand mentions, either manually or using an automated process. What now? Well, you want to turn these unlinked brand mentions into links pointing to your website, which is the entire point of this exercise. This is where outreach begins. Outreach is a science and we have created a downloadable guide on how to conduct outreach for unlinked brand mentions. Interested in our guide on “How to Conduct Unlinked Brand Mention Outreach”? Download Here