Watch the Overview of this post on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Evc5UfxAMQM

The competition in the search results these days is relentless. In most industries, you could explore a key product or service search, and find at least 5 relevant competitors occupying the search results with ads (sometimes multiple types), organic listings, and maybe even maps.

So how can you get ahead and be the leader of the pack?

Strong content, user experience, and SEO are a necessity. Once that’s taken care of, if you have the budget ads are the easiest route.

But what if you don’t have the budget to run them all the time? You’ve got to climb to the top of those organic rankings to have a chance and get placed elsewhere as another avenue for prospective customers to find you.

Enter backlinks and mentions.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a link from a website (that isn’t yours) to your website.

Backlinks are often noted as one of the strongest ranking factors for SEO efforts.

What is a mention?

A mention is just someone mentioning your brand name, in this circumstance, online.

You may have also heard about citations, this is just a more official mention often referencing something published on an academic level. Technically you could be cited and have a backlink associated with it.

There has been speculation that mentions are starting to have similar value to backlinks, and have always had some kind of ranking value, as they are an “implied link“.

3 Ways to Get Backlinks and Mentions

1. 1. Search: Do a search for your products, services, competing brands, or local business directories. You will find both free and paid opportunities to be listed. For example a common one these days is Yelp. We know Yelp is controversial with business owners, but trust us, it’s worth having a listing. This is just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll see other listing/directory sites (UpCity, Expertise, Clutch, G2, etc.), you can dive into related searches, the “people also ask” section, you might see articles pop up relevant to your industry, and more. These are arguably some of the most important places for your business to be present because they appear on the first or second page of relevant search results.
   2. Social Media: There are a lot of social media platforms, and most businesses we see are not on all of them. You can create pages, update existing ones, and make sure that your profile has a link to your website on it. Not to mention, you can regularly post with more specific links, leave comments and engage with your audience, regularly post and leverage the algorithm. There are numerous platforms out there that can help you publish one post to all platforms, like Hootsuite. This makes it easy and delivers consistency and professionalism. Even if you’re not posting, having a listing with a link is better than not being on a social media platform at all.
   3. PR + Email Marketing: Regularly pushing out PR can put a lot of links/mentions in a lot of different places, and in association with this it can be amplified via email marketing. Email marketing doesn’t necessarily give you backlinks or mentions, but it can drive traffic, and also push people to listings you’re in. You can also promote pages on your site, and get more activity/metrics from the site to improve upon.
   4. BONUS-Backlink Gap: A backlink gap is a comparison of your domain versus competitor domains. From this, you can find opportunities for backlinks based on where you competitors have them, but you do not. We use semrush to execute backlink gap analysis.

Tracking Progress

Once you’ve put in the work, you can start to monitor impact. Google Analytics 4 is a great place to get started. There, you can look at referral traffic to see if you’re generating traffic from any of your backlink locations.

If your backlinks are centered around a topic, service or product, you can monitor the rankings of those more specifically with Google Search Console. You could set a filter for a certain page, or search phrases that include a key phrase. With that, you can look at how the average position has shifted, if you’re seeing more appearances in search, and more clicks from search.

Keep an eye out for referral sources that are generating the most traffic and conversions, as those are the most valuable, and could be worth ad, promoted content, or other additional investment.

Success/Result Examples

Note: These examples do have other digital marketing strategies in play, but backlinks were a key focus and driver of the results

Example 1: Long-term consistent effort to improve backlinks. The graphic shows improvement to non-branded visibility in Google. This traffic improvement led to an increase in conversions and sales

Example 2: Short term, only 2 months after a round of backlink and mention work. The graphic shows a clear visibility improvement with some traffic growth. Even this minor traffic improvement had an impact on conversions

Next Steps: More Backlinks, Digital Marketing, and Maintenance

In the long term, you’ll want to earn more backlinks. It gets more difficult and requires more strategy. There are so many resources out there, here are a couple of great ones:

https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-get-backlinks/

https://backlinko.com/high-quality-backlinks

Along with earning more, you’ll need to regularly maintain the backlinks you’ve earned. For example, keeping an eye on any links you lost, and trying to get them back. If you change your URL or brand, you’ll need to request adjustment or adjust your backlinks if you’re able. You’ll also need to maintain your website, and the pages that are being linked to.

As noted previously, SEO and other digital marekting efforts are crucial to maximizing marketing investment, amplifying backlink impact, and encouraging business growth.

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