Branding is making a good impression on customers and targeted audiences through every possible effort. When it comes to marketing your brand, then leave no stone unturned. It is important to consider all important aspects of branding so that you can earn more trust from the audience.
Among all branding techniques, turning unlinked brand mentions into links is an important link-building technique or Off-page SEO that can help you to funnel a huge volume of targeted customers on your website.
Table of Contents
What Are Unlinked Brand Mentions & Why Turn Them Into Backlinks?
When your brand name is mentioned by published sites without providing a backlink to your website, then these are called unlinked brand mentions. When someone mentions your brand name, then it indicates your brand name is valuable in their text.
Though Google bot also gives value to brand mentions, brand mentions with links are far more valuable. Therefore, it is important to convert your brand mentions into backlinks that direct to your website. Valuable backlinks can help in increasing the authority, trust, and relevancy of a website.
Moreover, getting backlinks from renowned websites like Forbes, Crunchbase, Hubspot, etc. can significantly ramp up the traffic of your website.
Do you know that big brands in the market like Adobe, Semrush, Upwork, Amazon, and many more are already following these techniques?
Now, it is your turn to add this new technique to level your brand marketing.
How To Convert Unlinked Brand Mentions Into Links?
The only way to convert the unlinked brand mention into valuable links for your website is to ask them to do it. When someone has mentioned your brand name in the product or service explanation, blogs, or articles, then it means that they find your brand name valuable while sharing their information with the audience.
Also, it indicates that they are familiar with your business. Now, all you need to do is find these brand mentions and contact the website owners to convince them to add a valuable link to your website where they have mentioned your brand name.
This task is in fact anything but easy. It involves a lot of research work because you need to find the top publications where your brand name is mentioned. Let’s find out in detail how you can convert your brand mention into a backlink to your website.
Step By Step Process For Converting A Brand Mention Into a Backlink
- Search Unlinked Brand Mentions
- Prioritize Authoritative Websites
- Find Contact Details Of Decision Makers
- Create A Spreadsheet
- Create Personalized Outreach Copy
- Follow Up
- Offer Something In Return
1. Search Unlinked Brand Mentions
It is quite obvious that this process starts with finding your brand mentions on various websites.
But, how to find these mentions?
You need to make a list of phrases or keywords that other people can use to mention your brand. The most obvious one is your brand name.
Let’s consider the example of the Ahrefs brand. When people at Ahrefs start searching for the brand mention, they would look for the name of their organization- Ahrefs, which people may have used in their online publications.
Along with the brand name, there are various other phrases that people can use, which are associated with your brand. These mentions include:
- Name of your company’s main products or services
- Name of CEO or other influential people in the company, etc.
Once you have finalized the phrases, the next thing you need to do is search for these phrases’ mentions. You can do this in two ways- Manual Search And Using Tools
Manual Search
The manual search is time-consuming, but it is helpful when you don’t have any tools. To start with manual research, you need to start with Google Search Operators.
As we were discussing Ahrefs in our previous example, therefore, we would like to continue with the same. To find the brand mentioned – ‘Ahrefs’, you need to use the Google search operator as follows:
Intext: “Ahrefs”
You can clearly see that using the Google Search Operator has shown more than 58,000 results in just 0.35 seconds. There are various other Google Search Operators that can help you to find various phrases together on various websites and many more.
Using Tool
If you want to switch to a simpler method to find the unlinked brand mentions, then I would like to recommend you take the help of tools. A list of tools that you can use for finding unlinked brand mentions are:
- Google Alerts
- SEMRush
- BuzzSumo
- Ahrefs
And many more
2. Prioritize Authoritative Websites
If you are a well-established brand, then there is a high probability that you will find thousands of unlinked brand mentions. So, it is recommended that you should give priority to highly authoritative websites. To assess the authority of a website, you can use metrics like Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA). Also, you should check the traffic volume on the website to make the decision.
Pro Tip: To check traffic at the website and DA, PA of any website, you can use tools like Moz, SEMRush, etc.
Websites with high DA, and PA values and with a huge volume of traffic should be set at a high profile for converting unlinked brand mentions into linked ones. It will let you make the most of your outreach efforts.
3. Find Contact Details Of Decision Makers
Now, you know the names of websites where your brand name or other brand-linked phrases are mentioned. The next thing to do is find the contact details of the associated members of that website. It is really important to find the contact details of the person who’s responsible for the content on that website.
By finding the right email addresses to kick-start the conversation, you can increase the probability of quickly converting your unlinked brand mention into a linked one.
The best ways to find the contact details of the decision-makers are mentioned below:
Find Official Email
You should look for the official mail mentioned because it is one of the easiest ways to contact the person who can help you in converting the unlinked text into a linked brand mention.
Search Company’s Employee On LinkedIn
Another best way to find the right person is to search for people who are associated with the specific company on LinkedIn. You can contact them on LinkedIn. Also, some tools can help you to find the email addresses by using the First Name, Last Name of the person, and Domain Name. One of these tools is Getmail.
4. Create A Spreadsheet
It is very important to create a spreadsheet to keep a record for future reference. After all, you are going to convert enormous unlinked brand mentions into linked brand mentions. By maintaining a record, you can keep a close eye on unlinked brand mentions.
Moreover, handling so much data without a spreadsheet is gonna be a really difficult task.
Thus, you should make a spreadsheet, where you should mention the company’s name, contact person’s name, contact details, unlinked phrase, status, web page URL, and so on… as shown below. It is important to add a web page URL when your brand name is mentioned so that you can easily check that whenever you want.
You can add as many headings as you want to make your record helpful. By maintaining a sheet, you can easily get everything sorted and up to date.
5. Create Personalized Outreach Copy
Once you have created the spreadsheet, then you need to create a personalized outreach copy. It is time to use the power of your words to convince people.
Make sure your pitch sounds beneficial for the reader so that he shows interest in your email or message. You need to use words in such a way that your request for creating an unlinked Brand Mention into a linked one seems beneficial for your brand and reader’s website as well.
Keep your message short, meaningful, and attractive to the reader.
Sample Outreach Message
After sending your message to the right person, don’t forget to update the status on your spreadsheet. You can write “message sent” in the status column.
6. Follow Up
After sending a message to the shortlisted person, there is a huge probability that you get only a few responses. If someone has responded, then don’t delay starting the conversation and get high-quality backlinks from the sites where your brand name is mentioned without a link to your website.
But, don’t forget about those who have not responded to your message.
Now, it is time to send them a follow-up message. You should keep messaging them until you hear Yes or No from them. At the same time, you need to make sure that you are not irritating them by continually sending them follow-up messages or emails. You should send your first follow-up request after 3 to 5 days, the next follow-up after one week, and continue to send a message after two to three weeks.
So, draft your first follow-up mail. Make it personalized, and short. Here, I have given one sample follow-up mail.
Note: If you fail to get a response after two to three follow-up emails, then there is a probability that this email id or number is not in use. You should look for alternate contact details.
7. Offer Something In Return
The process of convincing people to convert unlinked brand mention into backlinks sounds easy.
But the reality is a little different!
As we all know that backlinks are very important in ranking your website, therefore, cold outreach may not be beneficial. It is harder to convince people to convert your unlinked brand mention. The best way to convince people is to offer them something in return:
- Free one-month subscription for your service
- Brand mention on your blog
- Link in next guest post
- Accept their guest post on your website
There is a probability that the prospect may not be satisfied with your offers. He may want more and you should show some flexibility based on how important that link is for your website.
Wrap Up
When you have established a good online presence, then there is a high probability that people are using your brand name or other unique phrase related to your business as an example. Sometimes, they add the URL of your website on the brand mention and sometimes they don’t.
We all know that backlinks play a major role in keeping your website high in Search Engine Result Pages. Thus, by converting the unlinked brand mention into a linked one, you can increase the authority and traffic of your website, which is beneficial you’re your online business.
So, putting your efforts into this technique will be worthwhile for your online business.