Manage your brand mentions

1. Use a specialized tool like Google Alerts, Mention, or BuzzSumo to keep track of brand mentions.

Google Alerts is a free tool that emails you every time someone mentions your brand in blogs or the news. Mentions can also be filtered by language and region. google.com/alerts

2. Get deeper insights like the number of shares or the domain authority of a website using a tool like BuzzSumo or Mention.

BuzzSumo and Mention continuously monitor your brand mentions and competitor mentions. Mention also monitors brand mentions from sources that aren’t the primary focus of a link-building campaign, like Twitter and Facebook. Mention found a reference to HubSpot in a blog post.

3. Find older brand mentions using a tool like BuzzSumo, Mention, or Ahrefs Content Explorer, then qualify the websites and reach out to publishers that provide the most SEO value.

Alternatively, perform a simple (free) Google search for your brand name, products, or services. However, you won’t get immediate insights into each article or publication. To prioritize reaching out for proper link attribution, find each publication’s domain authority or domain rating, how much organic traffic the article gets, and how many social shares it has received. Tools like BuzzSumo, Mention, and Ahrefs Content Explorer offer this kind of information for each article that mentions your brand. If you use Ahrefs, go to Content explorer and type in the search bar: “[brand name] AND -site:brand.com” to see all third-party mentions of your brand. You can then further filter the results by Domain rrating e.g. only see publications that mentioned your brand but have a DR > 40. This report shows HubSpot mentions from the past 12 months from websites with a Domain Authority over 40.

4. Find articles that don’t already link back to your website by using this advanced Google Sheets formula: =IMPORTXML(A2,"//a[contains(@href, 'yourwebsite.com')]")

Once you have your list of prospects, whether from Google Alerts or another SEO tool, drop all the article URLs into a Google Sheets document.

5. Keep the websites that can bring you the most SEO value and have the highest potential to link back to your website, once you reach out to them.

Keep the websites that have: High domain authority or rating (e.g. DR 40+) dofollow links A visible author who is not a guest author Links on the page to external sources

6. Eliminate websites that are not a good fit by checking their SEO value and potential for outreach.

Eliminate from your list: Competitors Social media platforms Job searching websites like Glassdoor Product comparison websites like Capterra, G2Crowd Big news publications (like Forbes) Other domains owned by your company

7. Look up each qualified article's author on LinkedIn and use a tool like Rocketreach or Voila Norbert to find their email address.

Make sure the author works for the website that mentioned your brand. Oftentimes, guest authors don’t have control over what they published, so they are unlikely to add a link back to you. Sometimes you can simply guess someone’s email address. If you find the email address of anyone in the company, you probably found their pattern (e.g. firstname.lastname@company.com). To verify your guesswork, type the email address in Google and see if you find any results where the email is mentioned.

8. Send the author of each mention a short message asking for proper link attribution and follow up at least once if they don't respond within 3-5 days.

Here’s an example of a quick note: Hey [First Name], My name is [User First Name] and I’m working on [Company] marketing team. I am reaching out to thank you for helping to spread the word about [Company] in your article: [ul:Linking From] I have a quick favor to ask: I was wondering if you could add a link to us ([ul:Linking To]) where you mention "[brand mention]" in case your readers want to know more about what we do? I would really appreciate it. Thanks for everything. Cheers!

9. Use the same method to reclaim links for other mentions that are related to your brand, such as your events you organize, employees' names, or research reports.