Building a powerful SEO strategy is a common goal – and one that can deliver immense results when executed properly. All too often, people focus on content and keywords, hoping that these two elements will be enough to deliver phenomenal results. Unfortunately, SEO encompasses dozens of considerations, with keywords and content only being one part of that.

Link building remains an absolutely vital component of SEO and can make a real difference in rankings and visibility. Many brands resent having to beg or ask for links, and some do not want to create content for others in order to generate a nominal mention.

Today, we’re going to look at how you can earn links from sources where you won’t have to cold-call or beg for results.

The Hidden Power of Mentions

While much of link building focuses around earning new mentions and links from other websites, brands that have been online for some time already have potential links waiting for them. Through the use of a few simple search queries, brands can search for mentions of their brand. These mentions often are easily found – and many do not provide links back to your website.

This is unfortunate; the website mentioning you obviously is familiar with your offerings and went far enough to mention you, but didn’t provide a link. This could be a mistake, or the writer was simply rushed for time. Either way, these instances provide powerful opportunities for you to start pinging links from these websites.

Approaching Brands That Have Mentioned (but Haven’t Linked)

Once you’ve made a list of all instances where brands have mentioned you but not linked back to your website, you can move on to contacting each one of them. Perhaps the best news regarding this effort is that because the brand has taken the time to mention you already, they are much more likely to include a link when asked.

This, of course, won’t likely be the case with brands mentioning you in a negative light, but most brand mentions do not fall into this category. Approaching these brands can be done in a straight-forward fashion; because you’re not inherently pitching your brand without a prompt, the writer or webmaster will be much more receptive.

You can choose to point out that perhaps a link back to the site was left out in error, or polite request a link be added along with the mention. Most brands understand the value of adding links to their content and receiving links back to their content from others, so it usually doesn’t take more than a quick email pointing out this discrepancy to earn a link.

Unlinked brand mentions are a veritable gold mine for many businesses and brands – but so many fail to ever turn them into bullion. This valuable form of link building is easier to accomplish than the standard method and generally has higher success results for the reasons previously mentioned. If you’re ready to start pinging links to search engines from new and influential websites, then taking advantage of this information is crucial.