How to Find Unlinked Mentions When the Brand is a Common Word

by Venchito Tampon Jr | Last Updated on October 24, 2021

Link reclamation is a common link building technique for marketers today.

The idea is very simple: you get all those publishers or content creators who’ve mentioned your brand or your content but haven’t linked to your site.

Then you reach out to them and ask to give you the links you deserve.

Oftentimes you gain a higher link placement rate than other link building techniques such as broken link building and guest blogging.

This is because there’s already a brand connection between you and the publishers as well as an intended reason to link to you in the first place (they’ve used your content).

Here at SharpRocket, we’ve covered the entire process of this strategy in our link reclamation guide.

Like any other link building techniques, there are loopholes you have to consider by looking at methodologies that’ll be effective to solve those particular problems.

In this post, we’ll cover one common challenge link builders face when executing the link reclamation technique.

That challenge is finding unlinked mentions when the brand is a common word.

It’s easy to spot pages that mentioned your brand if you have a unique brand name — i.e. Nike, Spotify, or Shopify.

There may be misspellings or typos as to how publishers may have mentioned your brand name on their posts — such in the case with Spotify or Shopify.

What is difficult to surface with are brand names with common words like Monday, or Apple. Monday is a project management software but is also referring to day itself. Apple as a technology company, while referring to a fruit.

As you go search for pages that mentioned your brand, you’re likely to see different results. What do you do to sift through these results to only find relevant outreach prospects?

 

On Link Prospecting Phrases

Regardless of the tools, you’ll be using for link reclamation prospecting, you need to have a list of words that should be associated with your brand.

In particular, these are your product types, product or service descriptions, or that one or two word detail about your brand.

Let’s take Monday as our example. Monday is a project management tool. So, obvious words likely to be associated with are: ‘Monday project management’ or ‘Monday task management’.

If you’re working as an agency and this is your first client, you get to have a better understanding of your initial meetings with them. Having a good grasp of what they are and their products or services offer to the market would give you a list of words that define their brand as a whole.

You may opt into some research on Google by typing their brand.

For instance, a Google search result for Monday gives you the site’s meta title and meta description. These are keywords the brand is trying to rank for in search.

Add these words as your associated phrases to your link reclamation prospecting process:

• Monday remote
• Monday remote team
• Monday teamwork
• Monday remote teamwork
• Monday processes
• Monday enterprise
• Monday project

Another way to discover words you can add to your link reclamation prospecting list is by going through all of the existing mentions of your brand.

You can use Ahrefs Backlink Explorer to find pages already linked to your site. I prefer checking in pages where publishers usually linked to. These include your site’s homepage and landing pages (e.g. product pages).

Sift through the pages and identify anchor texts publishers used to link to your webpages. There will be variations of anchor texts — long-tail description words and co-cited way of referring to your brand.

Add these newly discovered phrases (used as anchor texts) to your current link reclamation prospecting list.

Tools to Find Unlinked Mentions When the Brand is a Common Word

Link building requires some tools to surface brand mentions. Here are some tools you can use to find unlinked brand mentions.

1. Ahrefs Content Explorer

One of the tools that can help you with the link reclamation prospecting process is Ahrefs’ CE.

There are a lot of advanced search operators in CE. If you’re looking to return all pages that mention “Monday” AND either remote, team, process, project, management. You simply use “OR” to associated phrases.

So, the final advanced search query would be this: “Monday” AND (“project management” OR “remote team”).

If your brand is a very common word, make sure you choose phrases rather than single words to return pages closest to what you are looking for.

Another strong tip is to exclude terms that refer to other topics not related to what your brand is about. For Apple, that might be “recipe”, “pie”, “cake”, or “fruit” to exclude pages about the fruit term.

Be mindful that this may be tricky for some brands. In our example, “Monday” project management tool, if you exclude terms such as “day”, “week”, “month” or any calendar terms, you might end up excluding pages that mentioned both “day” and “project management” (which is about your brand) in the search results.

Hence, use exclusions if it makes sense to your brand.

Kindly click highlight unlinked domains and add the domain of your site. The websites of publishers that have never linked to you before will be highlighted, which means that the brand mentions those pages are unlinked.

2. Web mention tools

In link reclamation, you can’t get away from using web mention tools. These are web products specifically designed to find pages of your unlinked mentions.

Examples of these are Ahrefs’ Alerts feature, BrandMentions, and Google Alerts.

The same strategy with your search query inputs can be applied to web mention tools.

You can use any of the following search queries as your alert inputs.

Again, in our example today, you can have these queries:

• Monday remote work
• Monday remote team
• Monday teamwork
• Monday remote teamwork
• Monday processes
• Monday enterprise
• Monday project management tool

Exclusion and inclusion filters are also available in mention tools (AND, OR, —). Use them to your advantage to filter out irrelevant pages of your unlinked mentions.

Link Reclamation Made Simple

The most difficult challenge in link reclamation is sifted through results from your methods of link prospecting — manual and/or with the use of web mention tools.

If you’re an agency, you get to master this strategy over time, as you can unpack ways to figure out how to discover unlinked mentions when your clients’ brands are not common words.

Do you have any other tips to prospect for unlinked brand mentions? Let me know in the comment section below.