Google ranking factors are wide. Not all of them have the same impact on your SEO but they all can improve in some ways your position in the SERPs. In addition to classic links, Google also considers brand mentions as a ranking factor.
They refer to references of your brand on another sites without the use of a hyperlink. It can be blog posts, comments, press releases or other form of written contents where your brand name can be found.
When it comes to brand mention, it can be tough to measure your e-reputation. From mentions to conversations, how can you know exactly and precisely who is talking about you, your brand or your products? It exists some tools that can help you manage your brand mentions and exactly know what has been told on the Internet.
Tools to measure your brand mentions
Google Alerts
What is best than looking after a Google ranking factor with a Google tool? Google Alert allows you to set phrases or words to watch for and to receive an alert when Google find them. It can be done daily or in real time. However, sometimes, Google doesn’t catch everything and you can get some delay indexing entities.
Mention
This tool works like Google Alerts but within a nicer interface. Using this dashboard, you can also include your social accounts to directly and quickly respond to mentions.
Sprout Social
This social media monitoring tool can also be useful for social listening. In fact, you can have access to any brand mentions thanks to its dashboard.
Social Mention
It offers a super easy interface to search for a word on the Internet. Actually it digs into any medias from Facebook to Photobucker.The tool even displays insights about positive or negative mentions, top keywords used, reach, passion, etc. The interface is not really fancy but it has the advantage to be clear and efficient.
[Case Study] Improving rankings, organic visits and sales with log files analysis
Brand mentions and SEO
Brand mentions must be part of an overall linking strategy to appear natural. Conventional links and brand mentions are complementary to create an efficient SEO strategy and improve your visibility and authority. However, you must be aware that a balance between those two is needed:
- A too high ratio between conventional link-to-brand mention will look suspicious to Google, so you might get penalized.
- Infographics are still a valuable solution to create naturally brand mentions and links – videos as well.
- Check from where links pointing to your site come from. They must be from qualitative websites. You can use the Open Site Explorer from Moz to know if a site is trustworthy.
- Do not over optimize your URL anchors with keywords; they must look natural.
