How To Build Links With Brand Mentions

Building high-quality links to your site isn't easy, and without a plan, you'll be left with a cold response or worse no response at all from site owners you reach out to trying to get them to link to your content. I understand it can be frustrating to see you put together lists and outreach emails for your content only to feel as if that time was wasted, but the link building game isn't meant to be easy. If anyone could build high-quality links to their site, the metric wouldn't mean as much, but due to its difficulty, Google has decided to place a high value on backlinks.

Link building is all about getting the flywheel going the more links you build, the better your site ranks, the more natural links you will acquire with time. Also, the higher the authority of your site, the more likely people will take you seriously when cold contacting them with link building opportunities.

Start with those who know you

One of the easiest ways or rather ways of least resistance is to start looking for sites that are already talking about you or sharing your content. If they are familiar with your site or you're have shared or mentioned you in the past, we can assume that they would be open to hearing from you.

Start by looking for sites who have mentioned your brand name in their content but have not linked to you. I would recommend using the various search engines and reviewing results for your brand name using various search operators such as:

• brand name
• inurl brand name
• intitle
• intext
• filetype
• related

Once you've done your search, repeat it on the various search engines such as:

• Check out Google results
• Check out Bing results
• Check out DuckDuckGo results
• Check out dSearch results

If you have any other local search engines, you may want to repeat the process there too to find anything the other search engines may have missed.

Once you've found sites that have mentioned you, start to make contact with these sites to try and get them to link back to you.

Protip! If possible, always try to link to the most contextually relevant URL on your site. After reading the content recommend the webmaster use a link that would be most applicable. For example, if they speak about your packages, make sure they link to the packages page and not the homepage. This form of deep linking improves your contextual linking, drives authority and traffic to the correct pages, reduces bounce rate and improves conversion rates. Brand mention email template

If you're not used to cold emails, you can use the bland standard pitch below but don't be lazy. Try to add your personality into the mail and make it appealing to read. People aren't stupid, and they know when a template email is blasting their inbox, so the more customised your email, the better the chances of converting them into a link.

Dear Sir/Madam

I am **Name and position** of **XXX company* I recently came across your article where you happened to mention our brand. We're pretty flattered that you like us so much to take the time to write about what we're trying to achieve in the *Market/field of expertise*.

The reason for reaching out is because we were wondering if you could link to us on the following article **insert link** and if you could link it to *link to your site* we would appreciate the gesture.

Regards

**Name**

Social brand mentions and hashtags

Next on your hitlist would be social media, browse through the various social media sites and do a post search for your brand name or brand name hashtags. If you find any accounts mentioning your brand check out if they have their website or blog like Medium and reach out to see if you can get any mentions published with these users or businesses.

Repeat the process across the major networks like:

• Facebook
• Medium
• Reddit
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Linkedin
• Quora

Brand mention email template or DM message

If you find a brand mention on social media and the account has a website you can either offer to guest post on their site or pay them to write a post about your site or offer them a subscription to your service. The incentive to get them to write and link to your website is up to you.

If you have never reached out to an account before, here's a standard outreach template.

Dear Sir/Madam

I am **Name and position** of **XXX company* I recently came across your article where you happened to mention our brand. We're pretty flattered that you like us so much to take the time to mention us on your **social media channel** and thought we could discuss a possible collaboration.

Regards

**Name**

A little automation never hurt

If this all seems like way too much work sifting through the internet for mentions of your brand, some tools can help make the job more comfortable such as Social Mention.

Set up a Social Mention alert

Social Mention has a free trial of its service which you can try out, or you can pay for the full access and track multiple brand accounts across the web, which is ideal for agencies who manage various sites.

Set up a Google Alert

To keep up to date with what people are saying about your brand without having to manually search each time you can set up a google alert that will ping you each time a new "brand mention" is indexed by the search engine.

Head over to https://www.google.com/alerts to create yours now.

Note: Remember not every brand mention especially those on social media may use your brand name correctly so look our for misspellings or hyphenated versions of your brand, so you don't miss out on a single opportunity to reach out.

Contact us

If you're having trouble getting started with a link building strategy then feel free to contact us and let's see how we can help your site grow with SEO and link building.

Are you looking to promote your business?

South African Business owners can create your free business listing on nichemarket. The more information you provide about your business, the easier it will be for your customers to find you online. Registering with nichemarket is easy; all you will need to do is head over to our sign up form and follow the instructions.

If you require a more detailed guide on how to create your profile or your listing, then we highly recommend you check out the following articles. 

• How to create a nichemarketer profile 
• How to create a nichemarket business listing 

Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts about link building.

• How To Use Dead Link Building To Boost SEO
• How To Evaluate A Webpage For Backlinking
• How To Reclaim Lost Backlinks
• How To Build Local Links To Your Site
• Google Ads Support For New Link Attributes

Tags: Link Building , SEO