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How to get links to your site by using brand mentions

by Jenny Illmann | 13.07.2016

Most SEO experts know that brand mentions of your clients are a good way to get high value links. Unfortunately, we often forget to use this tactic because it can be a bit fiddly in terms of actually identifying brand mentions in a reactive and quick way. Here are a few ways to set up brand alerts to help you stay on top of your brand mentions on the web.

1. Google Alerts

Google Alerts can be set up using your Gmail account and will send a notification to you when your client/brand or keyword has been mentioned on the web. You can receive your notifications daily or on a weekly basis. Once you notice that your client/brand has been mentioned in an article for example, you can approach the publication and ask for a link to your client`s website.

The set us is extremely easy and looks like this:

cloud solutions

Simply enter your brand name or keyword and create the alert.

A problem with Google Alerts that it has now become a little bit unreliable and hit and miss so it is recommended to not use this as the only tool to monitor mentions of your brand on the web

2. Buzzsumo

BuzzSumo, the content marketing platform allows you to set up alerts as well as well as see the social mention count of the content straight away which can help you make a quick decision on which type of content is worth going after in order to get a link and which isn’t. After all, social media mentions likely factor into Google`s ranking algorithm as Facebook and Twitter are crawled by search bots.

Setting up an alert on Buzzsumo is easy:

  1. Go into the ‘Monitoring’ feature on BuzzSumo
  2. You can set up a new alert by clicking on ‘Create new alert’ which will bring up the following options:

buzzsumo

  1. Choose the type of alert you would like to receive
  2. Create alert to receive alerts

BuzzSumo’s interface as shown above allows for more detailed searches on a variety of types of alerts such as ‘backlinks’ which is a handy alert if you would like to monitor earned links to a piece of content for example.

The last thing you will have to do is to approach the publication/influencer that mentioned your brand. You may have to look for their contact details or even approach the general outlet if it is a newspaper for example and ask to be directed to the relevant person that mentioned your brand.

This approach works well for brands that are already a bit better known and get mentioned on a regular basis, however, once you start putting out content about your brand, chances are it will get picked up by other sources than the ones you actively approach yourself which is where brand alerts come in handy.