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Unlinked Mentions
Unlinked Mentions
How to earn links from websites that have already mentioned your organization or brand.
Vlad Orlov avatar
Written by Vlad Orlov
Updated over a week ago

Intro

Unlinked Mentions is probably the single highest-converting link building strategy out of them all.

It is very straightforward: you find websites that have already mentioned you but didn’t attach a link to your brand name.

Then, you will be reaching out to them and asking to turn that mention into a backlink, offering some value from your side as well (social share, free subscription to your tool, etc.).

The reason why unlinked mentions have possibly the highest conversion rate is very simple: the people who you will be reaching out to have already spoken about you in their content, which means they are predisposed to giving you a backlink.

And after you sprinkle some extra value for them on top, they have no reason to turn down your pitch.

Note: this strategy works particularly well for more established websites, and it is a great idea to run unlinked mentions campaigns on a quarterly basis.

Discovery

  1. Use two search operators in your search query:

    1. intext: (tells Respona to look for mentions of your brand in the text of the articles)

    2. -site (tells Respona to exclude your own site from the results)

  2. For our own website, a hypothetical search would look like this:

    1. intext:"respona" -site:respona.com

  3. Select an article and check if your mention has a link attached to it or not. If it’s an unlinked mention, select the opportunity for your campaign by checking the box to the left of the article’s title.

  4. You can also filter out unlinked mentions automatically using Screaming Frog.

You can also use Respona’s keyword search automation to speed up the process:

respona keyword search automation

You can access it by going to Step 1 - Find Content and clicking on “Automation setup” in the top right corner:

respona keyword search automation 2

1. Select a search source.

2. Enter your search query.

3. Set advanced settings:

  • How many results to analyze (Google provides us with the top 100 results);

  • The location of your search;

  • Language;

  • Safety filters.

4. Click “Continue”.

setting additional seo filters

5. You will be taken to the metrics screen. Here, you can set additional filters such as:

  • Domain Rating (available even if you don’t have an Ahrefs connected);

  • Website traffic;

  • Traffic value;

  • Organic keywords;

  • Referring domains;

  • Backlinks;

To use these filters (besides DR), you will need to connect your Ahrefs account to Respona.

6. Click “Run automation”.

automation in progress

7. Once the automation is finished, the results will be automatically added to your campaign.

No credits will be charged for using the keyword search automation.

Template

Unpersonalized

Subject: [Your Company] mention in your post

Hi {first_name},

[Your Name] here with [Your Company Name].

I wanted to quickly send over a huge thank you for mentioning us in your post "{url_title}".

Sent the article over to our social team to share with our [# of Followers] following but they're wondering if you can make the text where you mention us clickable to [Your Company Website]?

Hopefully this would help your readers find [Your Company Name] much easier if they'd like to go more in-depth with the reference.

Thank you.

[Signature]

Personalized

Subject: Respona mention in your post

Hi John,

Vlad here with Respona.

I wanted to quickly send over a huge thank you for mentioning us in your post "Top 15 Email Marketing Automation Software".

Sent the article over to our social team to share with our 100k following but they're wondering if you can make the text where you mention us clickable to Respona?

Hopefully this would help your readers find Respona much easier if they'd like to go more in-depth with the reference.

Thank you.

Vlad Orlov

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