According to Google, Brand mentions are becoming a key contributing factor to a sites authority. This means that Brand Name Link Building cannot be ignored when it comes to SEO from now on, however, this does not mean traditional link building is completely dead.

Brand name link building increases your Brand mentions thus establishing you as an authority in Google’s eyes.

Here are some possible reasons why Brand mentions is becoming important:

It is becoming a key metric for measuring a site’s authority

As Google shifts away from traditional link building as the key factor for determining a site’s authority, brand mentions are becoming a better alternative. This means creating strong links with your brand name will have a positive effect on your overall web traffic.

Unlike anchor text and links it create less room for manipulation

Links and anchor texts can easily be manipulated. In some cases, links point to sites that are totally unrelated to what people are searching for, thus creating a bad user experience. On the other hand, Brand mentions are more difficult to manipulate as they remain relevant and within the context of the content they are placed.

It is a better way of Leveraging Social Signals for SEO

Social shares generated from social media are no-follow links hence have little impact on rankings. But with Brand mentions, search engines are able to leverage on shares, tweets, comments and other social network generated mentions of a brand, even in the absence of links.

It is already Important for Local SEO

Brand mentions, and therefore Brand Name Link Building, is crucial for small and medium scale enterprises that are targeting customers within a particular locality. This makes it easy for search engines to pull results of popular brands that target a particular region when customers type in the search box.

How to Find Unlinked Brand Mentions for Brand Name Link Building

1. Find mentions manually using Google Search operators

Besides Google being a search engine, it is also a powerful marketing tool. Google operators help you find anything written about your brand all over the internet.

For example, if we wanted to find all mentions of the keyword ‘digital marketing’ except on managemytraffic.com we would use the following search operator:

digital marketing -managemytraffic.com -twitter.com -facebook.com -pinterest.com -youtube.com

Format: [insert keyword] -[insert the domain of the website you want excluded from the results] -twitter.com -facebook.com -pinterest.com -youtube.com

This is just a simple example. You can learn more about Google search operators here:

2. Find mentions using using tools

Tools save you a lot of time and make finding brand mentions much easier.

Google Alerts

Google alerts notifies you whenever new mentions of a specific keywords or phrases happen on the web.

The tool gives you the option of set how often you get notifications, the sources, language, region, how many, and where you want the alerts delivered.

For instance, we as a digital marketing agency can set up an alert for the words ‘web traffic’ which will aid in our link building efforts for that keyword.

Google alerts is free and easy to set up and helps you identify opportunities of where you can build strong links for your brand.

Other alternative tools: Ahrefs Alerts, Talkwalker Alerts, Mention, Brand mentions.

Email Outreach

Once you have identified potential areas you can do Brand name link building, you need to contact the sources. The method we recommend at this stage is doing email outreach.

Luckily, there are tools that help you send personalized, efficient, relationship-based outreach that produces great results. The tool that we personally use is Mailshake.

Other alternative tools: Buzzstream, Pitchbox, NinjaOutreach.

5 Off-Page Ranking Factors Besides Backlinks

1. Return Visitors

Google and other major search engines monitor the IP addresses of visitors who visit a particular website over a given period of time. They are also able to track how many of these visitors return to the same webpage over the same period.

Search engines consider websites with more return visits as more trustworthy and helpful than those with a few return visitors.

As a result, these websites are ranked higher in search results and are given more authority.

Ways you can keep visitors coming back to your website:

As they say in Miami – Dale.

Improve the user experience on your website

Everyone likes to visit a clean, inviting website that is easy to navigate both on a desktop and mobile device. Avoid having too many pop-ups, buttons, adverts, social icons and overly large images that require users to scroll to view content.

Create unique and useful content

Having fresh and helpful content on your website will keep visitors coming back again and again. Your content needs to appeal to your core demographic and needs.

Once such way, is to create case studies or a series of articles that help solve your audience’s problems. This way, they will have a resource to refer to at every stage of their journey.

Neil Patel creates rich content and case studies and this drives thousands of return visitors to his website.

Encourage email subscriptions

Including a call to action that encourages visitors to join your email newsletter will encourage them to share their email address.

This allows you to send out newsletters whenever you have new great content to share with them.

Only include a snippet of your post, an image that fits the context of your topic and no more than 2 links pointing to your full article.

Improve website loading speed

Studies carried out by Kinsta showed that every one-second delay in loading time leads to a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction and an 11 percent drop in page views.

Visitors are never patient enough to return to a slow loading website.

Counter this problem by choosing a web-hosting provider that is able to start up on demand.

Optimizing your images for the web also helps pages load a lot faster.

Provide a compelling offer

Not all visitors will fall in love with your content but if you have something extra to offer them in return, this may turn them into return visitors.

For instance, you can create contests, offer discounts to your blog readers, etc.

A good example of this strategy is how the owner of the Love, Mrs. Mommy blog promoted a contest.

2. Click Through Rate

Click through rate is the proportion of visitors who click on a specific link to a particular site.

A high click through rate tells search engines that users love your site, resulting to a rise in search engine rankings over time.

Ways to increase organic click through rate

Create attention grabbing headlines

Good headlines pull visitors in. When creating your title, meta-descriptions, page copy, email campaigns, and banner ads the headlines should be attention grabbing enough to help your content stand out from your competitors.

For example, a search for ‘best place to visit in Hawaii’ on Google displayed the following results:

See how the second result stands out?

Not only does the title mention 10 best places but it also says ‘(with photos & map)’.

This effort alone by the website owner is likely to draw in more visitors to the site.

Optimize your Meta-descriptions

Just like the title, your meta-description should be optimized for high click-through rate. There are several ways you can do this:

1. Provide an answer to a question in the meta-description– Users are mainly looking for answers to their problems when they type into the search box. If you can answer their question in your meta-description, they are more likely to visit your website to learn more.
2. Make the meta-description specific and relevant- make the meta-description as specific and relevant as possible. It should be related to what people are typing into the search box.

Employ Rich Snippets

Snippets are a way for you to showcase your best content, especially if you are an eCommerce marketer.

The easiest way to integrate snippets is to use the All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin.

Attract users with quality visual assets

Incorporating images and photos is one of the most effective ways of optimizing content on social media. Use images and photos to capture the attention of your audience and to explain difficult concepts better.

If you have graphic design knowledge, this is easy for you.

However, even if you are not, easy to use tools such as Piktochart, Powtoon and Canva will help you create amazing graphics.

Employ Bread Crumb Navigation

Breadcrumb navigation is supported by Google and it allows users to easily navigate a site through a step-by-step pathway of links.

A simple search for ‘headphones’ on google displays the following results:

See how the links on best buy are arranged? (Headphones fall under the Audio category).

This allows users to find a link back to easily go back to their startpage. No need for a back button.

Following the Google Developers quick guide will help you set up breadcrumbs on your site.

IMPORTANT NOTE: we’ve definitely add  Breadcrumbs to Our eCommerce website  Men’s wallets    to achieve our goal And generate organic traffic 🙂

Analyze Google Analytics Results

Making proper use of Google analytics will not only help you improve your organic search rankings but also email campaigns, call to action and landing page conversion rates.

Taking action based on analysis of your Google analytics results will help you serve your audience better thus improving your click through rate.

Optimize URLs for Users

Make your URLs clickable and relevant.

The last Google result in the search query below is an example of a URL that is not optimized.

Unlike the first two URLs, the last URL does not tell the visitors what the page is about. Furthermore, it is not easy to share.

Build high converting landing pages

All the efforts you put into research, writing, optimization, tracking and link building are wasted if your landing page doesn’t convert.

The solution is to build high converting landing pages.

Split test several landing page designs at the beginning and choose on that works best instead of settling on a specific one straight out the box..

Use heatmaps to enhance site clicks

Click through rate can be easily increased if you understand the areas where your visitors click most when they visit your website.

Crazyegg is a great example of a heatmap tool you can use to optimize your click through rates.

3. Pogo-sticking

Pogo-sticking occurs when a website ranks highly on Google but fails to satisfy the needs of those typing in that specific search term in the search box.

As a result, these users go back to Google and click on another result or type in something different.

If this happens multiple times, Google concludes that the particular web page is attracting the wrong audience thus leaving them unsatisfied and should be ranked lower.

Targeting search terms that are too broad or having a poor website design can contribute to pogo-sticking.

If navigating your website is difficult or the web page takes long to load, visitors are likely to go back to the search results and click on another webpage.

Ways to avoid pogo sticking

1. Ensure your website loads fast and is easy to navigate. It should support users searching from different devices. This is achievable through a good UX design.
2. Understand what users are looking for and provide them with a solution that solves their problems. Also include images or video that help explain difficult to grasp concepts.
3. Ensure that hyperlinks direct visitors to web pages with the content they expect.

4. Local SEO

Local SEO refers to the optimization of a website so that it ranks highly on the search results page- for a particular region.

For example, https://managemytraffic.com/locations/ targets visitors looking for Miami SEO local Term

This allows our landing page to be more targeted towards customers and businesses situated in Miami.

If we wanted to create another landing page targeting customers in Jacksonville, Florida, we would apply the URL; https://managemytraffic.com/locations/jacksonville-fl

5. Post Length

Pages with thousands of words tend to do way better than those with hundreds of words.

This could be explained by the fact that longer posts are able to rank for different variations of keyword terms and phrases typed into Google. This trend is unlikely to change in 2019.

The impact of post length on organic search is better explained in this infographic.

An important thing to note, however, is that shorter quality content will always outrank lengthy poorly written content.

So if you have to write long content make sure it is useful to your audience.

Conclusion:

In 2019, Brand name link building will be an important ranking factor as Google slowly turns away from traditional ranking factors.

Return visitors, Click-through Rate, Pogo-sticking, Local SEO, and Post Length will all contribute to the overall ranking of your webpage on search results.

The ranking factors discussed in this post are long term SEO strategies that require time before you start noticing results.