How to Convert Unlinked Mentions into Quality Backlinks?

Businesses strive for backlinks. But did you know that there are tons of instances when your website is mentioned on a different page but there are no hyperlinks redirected back to your website? This is what we call unlinked mentions. Backlinks are really the gold standard when it comes to SEO optimization and with plenty of unlinked mentions, your business could be losing out on a lot of potential traffic.

By claiming these unlinked mentions, you stand to gain a ton of credible backlinks. Who would want to miss out on such a massive SEO boost? So, to help you out, we have detailed the specific process of finding and claiming such unlinked mentions. Let’s get straight to it.

What are Unlinked Mentions?

In simple terms, an unlinked mention is when your brand is mentioned or referred to by a certain publication but does not link back to your website. Though this definitely helps you to boost brand recognition, you stand to lose out on a lot of that creamy traffic that could have been yours. Therefore, claiming such unlinked mentions holds a huge potential for your business.

Failing to claim such unlinked mentions comes with its set of disadvantages. These include

• Missing out on relevant traffic.
• Missing out on valuable backlinks that can improve your search engine standings.
• Missing out on the key benefits of link building.

If you too, don’t want to miss out on such tremendous perks, claiming such unlinked mentions is key to your website’s success.

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Finding Unlinked Mentions

Now that you are determined to make the most of your mentions, you will need to find out the unlinked mentions and convert them into valuable backlinks for your business. Let us take a look at how you can easily scan for unlinked mentions across the web and claim the ones from the most authoritative domains.

Collecting Unlinked Mentions

This might be the most time-consuming work, but it is absolutely worth it. The first step is to find keywords that your website might be associated with. Once, you have a set of relevant keywords, tools like Hunter.io, Ahrefs, Moz, and others can be valuable tools in your arsenal to analyze and find out most of the unlinked mentions lurking around on the internet.

Some of these tools also give you the ability to monitor any new mentions for your website that might pop up after your analysis. Now, tabulate the data on a spreadsheet for easier reference.

Note: Ensure to do a manual check for each source. No software can beat human eyes!

Filtering Prospects

Now that you have found most of the unlinked mentions across the web, you will need to filter out the data and focus on the ones with the highest domain authority. As a benchmark, Zapier suggests to target domains that have

• A domain rating of over 30
• The traffic of over 100
• More than 500-page words
• Been written in your target language

Depending on your brand size and value, your target values might fluctuate.

Once you have filtered out your data, your data set should be refined to a more manageable size.

Finding Contact Information

With a filtered dataset on hand, you will now need to find the contact information for the admins of the domains you are targeting. This can be done in two ways.

• Manually: Checking the contact page of each domain to find email addresses or phone numbers.
• Automatic: There are plenty of online email extraction tools that can extract contact information with a click of a button.

Note: If you are targeting a large number of domains, it is suggested that you use email extraction tools to save time.

Converting Unlinked Mentions into Backlinks

Now that you have extracted the contact information for the decision makers for most of the domains featuring your brand as unlinked mentions, it is time to reach out.

Draft Email

Ensure to create a draft email that is personalized for each domain to give you the maximum chance of getting a reply. You can use a bulk emailing service like Mail Chimp to blast out your emails to your prospects.

Follow up

It can be quite common to not get a reply on the first attempt. There is no need to be frustrated. Leave a custom follow-up mail. You can generally expect a reply within the second or third follow-up. Also, ensure to send your follow-up emails in the same thread so that the recipient does not lose context.

Pitch

After successfully connecting with the admins, you can simply request them to place a link to your website along with the mentions so that you can get your backlinks. In a perfect world, everyone would say yes. But here on earth, things are not that simple. Here are a few tips to help them persuade

• Offer something in return
• Try and respond promptly to their queries and requests
• Be flexible with your terms.

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Each unlinked mention is an unused opportunity to gain valuable backlinks to your website. Though, this might seem a bit daunting at first, claiming unlinked mentions is one of the easiest ways to score some authoritative backlinks to improve your SEO. Instead of asking people to refer to your brand in their content, it is much easier for you to convince them to add a hyperlink if they have already mentioned your business.