Yes, they do.
But stop, don’t click away just yet. Not all types of these so-called brand mentions, linkless mentions, or linkless backlinks help your SEO.
In today’s article, we’ll discuss which ones do and which ones don’t, along with the science behind how linkless brand mentions actually help SEO.
You want to check this out because you can apply the same concept in other aspects of your marketing and significantly speed up your SEO.
Let’s get into it!
~4 Minute Read
Quick Answer
In short, linkless brand mentions do help your SEO and result in higher rankings. Linkless brand mentions can help both your website's organic rankings and Google Business Profile rankings on Google Maps but still, ideally, you'd want a full backlink.
What is a Linkless Brand Mention/Linkless Backlink?
A linkless brand mention/linkless backlink is, simply put, a written mention of your brand on another website on the internet without a hyperlink back to your website (in other words, without a backlink).
Here’s an example of one of our linkless mentions:
The article in question mentioned our brand, even linked to my LinkedIn profile, but didn’t link to our website.
This is a great example of a linkless brand mention/linkless backlink.
Here’s another example of a linkless backlink from one of our clients:
Why Would Website Owners Avoid Linking To Your Website?
The overall awareness about the value of a backlink is rising on the internet.
Webmasters who began as normal bloggers are developing into SEO professionals over time, and subsequently recognizing the value of mentioning another brand on their now-prominent blog or a media platform.
Many media websites, like the one you see above, have policies of not linking out to much, or at all, besides to other articles of their own website.
However, brands still pitch their expertise to these writers in hopes of just getting mentioned, which can be as valuable as a backlink almost, given that many of these articles get promoted extensively by the website owners.
This brings us to…
How Do Linkless Brand Mentions Help SEO?
Google has the ability to measure the overall prominence of a brand on the web without just looking at the number of backlinks a website has.
Besides brand mentions, they also look at:
- Social media presence and subsequent following a business has (along with engagement)
- Branded searches, AKA Google users Google-ing a particular brand’s name, job positions, reviews, and more
- Paid ads because most bigger brands usually run ads, correct?
They measure and associate all of these factors to the overall “prominence” of a particular brand.
The more prominent a given brand is, the higher they’ll rank.
I talked a lot about prominence on this blog, and it’s not a secret—Google openly tells this on their local ranking guidelines page, which, ironically, most business owners never read.
However, they don’t go as deep into the specifics, but they still give out little cues. Quoting: “Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business, from across the web, like links, articles, and directories.”
A brand mention is also “information about a business,” it’s just not linked to a website.
Triggering Branded Searches
An indirect way brand mentions help SEO is through trigger branded searches.
As I mentioned above, these help build your web prominence, and here’s how that would work typically:
- Your brand gets featured on a media platform
- Depending on the audience size of a media platform, a certain number of users read the article where you’re mentioned
- They see your brand, but don’t have the ability to click and check you out, so they go to Google and look up the brand name
This helps your SEO, regardless of the type of business you are and the industry you’re in.
Unless your brand has a lot of other brands with very similar names, you’ll show up in those searches.
And even if it doesn’t, by getting listed on directories with consistent information (AKA citations), you can build up your brand relatively quickly so that people can more easily find you.
Now, of course, whether linkless brand mentions will trigger branded searches for your brand depends on the overall topic of the article, how many people see the article, and how interesting the context surrounding your brand is in the article.
Other Ways You Can Use to Increase Branded Searches
So, maybe you’ve caught on to what I’m trying to say—one of the core benefits of linkless backlinks is triggering branded searches.
Here are few other ways you could trigger branded searches:
- Running paid ads
- Building a social media presence
- Being active in forums
And, last but not least, referrals from your customers can also do branded searches of your brand when looking at your pricing and reviews, so having great customer service counts, ya know?
How to Get More Brand Mentions
Well, ideally, you’d want a backlink still.
However, the way you’d acquire either or is the same, and it’s the one I outlined in our link-building guide – HARO.
Quoting myself (no fake humility here, haha):
“HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out, a PR company connecting journalists with sources for a myriad of different topics, the most prominent of which is business.
You’d sign up at their website as a source, and then select the topics in which you’re interested. HARO is owned by Connectively, so you have to sign up there.
HARO is how I got my name and multiple websites, both for my marketing services and other types of services.”
HARO and its alternatives (check out on Google for HARO alternatives, there are plenty, all of which work) helped me land backlinks like these:
And also linkless backlinks like these:
The entire “As Seen In” section on this site came from HARO:
How to Track Linkless Brand Mentions
Honestly, it’s a manual thing, as far as I’m aware.
The most reliable source is Google itself. Go to Google and search this EXACT query; just replace the placeholder with your own information: “your brand name” -inurl:yourwebsite.com (doing this many times can trigger Captcha on Google).
You’ll see everywhere you’re mentioned on Google, as long as those pages are indexed.
For most small business owners, this won’t be a lot of information to go through but for bigger brands, it can add up quickly.
If you know of a tool more reliable at tracking this than Google itself, let me know. Seriously.
That's It for Today
This brings us to the end of this sweet post.
As always, hopefully you found value in it.
And yes, I know my outros are boring, and I’m working on that.
Want to learn more about local SEO? Check out some of our other articles:
- What Industries Need SEO The Most?
- Does Replying to Google Reviews Help SEO?
- How SEO and Google Ads Work Together?
Need more help?
If you have an existing website and a Google Business Profile you’d like to be SEO-ed and bring more sales for your company, get our free SEO audit!
Bogdan is a local SEO expert with over 3 years of experience helping businesses grow using Google. When he is not helping businesses grow, he works on his own SEO projects, works out, takes long walks, and watches Suits, which is completely ironic given how rarely he dresses up in a suit himself.