Table of Contents
You can find opportunities to claim links for your content (like ebooks and infographics) similarly to how you find unlinked mentions and links to reclaim for your brand. Acquiring all the links you deserve can move the needle on search and traffic. Here are three common missed opportunities and fixes for each.
Image via Lel4nd on Flickr
Missed Opportunity #1: Only Searching for Your Content’s Title
Fix: Also look for the titles that other sites give your content.
When sites like Mashable and HuffPo pick up your content, they’ll usually change the headline to suit their audiences. Then, when smaller sites pick up stories from those big players, they use the same wording.
Sometimes, the smaller sites do their homework and credit you by linking to your original content, but often they credit the sites like Mashable and HuffPo instead.
How to find these opportunities: Look at the post titles and headings that big sites use to describe your content and enter them into a tool like Fresh Web Explorer.
Here’s an example of a Fresh Web Explorer unlinked mention search using the terms that big sites used to describe this Oscar dress infographic.
How to reach out: Simply thank the site owner for sharing your content and ask if they’d be kind enough to credit the original with a link back. Whenever you can, use this outreach as an opportunity to build a relationship. Share the post on your own social media channels and offer to ping the blogger when you release similar content in the future.
Missed Opportunity #2: Ignoring Sub-Sections and Data Points
Fix: Looking for cropped versions and unique text, too.
If you have very large visual content, bloggers and journalists will likely take screenshots and create smaller versions that better fit their blogs’ layouts (or things like Twitter’s 2:1 aspect ratio). As you’re doing your own reporting roundup, look out for these smaller clips.
For example, Google Analytics created a 2:1 image of a recent infographic to optimize a tweet.
How to find these opportunities: Do a reverse image search or set an Image Raider alert to find instances of bloggers using the cropped images. Hit the Buzzmarker to check for a link on those pages (or manually check using “View Page Source”).
In you have a lot of text content: If you did original research, look for instances of people sharing your data points and not crediting you.
In you created sub-content like diagrams: Run reverse image searches on those, too.
How to reach out: Again, a polite thank you and request for credit will serve you well.
Missed Opportunity #3: Forgetting about International
Fix: Get familiar with Google’s other TLDs.
Even content with a lot of english text can get picked up by non-english sites. Here, too, are many opportunities to earn high-authority links.
Image of english infographic on non-english site.
How to find these opportunities: Run reverse image searches on domains like Google.es and Google.de to find these sites. (If you’re using Chrome, you can hit the “translate” button to understand what the sites are about.) Then hit the Buzzmarker or view page source to check for links.
How to reach out: Since this outreach is short and simple, translation tools work relatively well. However, investing a few dollars in a service like Gengo can give you a much better template to work from (which you can save and use in the future, too).
Learn More about Unlinked Mentions and Link Reclamation:
Link Reclamation Whiteboard Friday by Ross Hudgens of Siege Media
Guide to Using Unlinked Brand Mentions for Link Acquisition by Kiala Strong on Moz
Reclaiming Links to Your Infographics and Creative Common Images by Kristi Hines on iAcquire
Monitoring Your Brand — Unlinked Mentions by Sarah Gurbach of SEER Interactive
Link Building 101: Finding Web Mentions by Jon Ball of PageOnePower
Check out the BuzzStream Podcast
