Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, building links is an essential part of SEO. There are numerous ways to do this, including paying for links to your website, finding mentions of your brand online, and more. Getting your website listed in search engines isn’t the only way to do it, but it’s one of the best.
Citations
Having a strong citation profile is a great way to improve local SEO rankings. There are many tools and services that offer different ways to track citation statuses. However, there are a few basic steps you need to follow.
There are two main types of citations: structured and unstructured. Structured citations are usually in the form of an online business directory. These citations contain information such as a phone number, company name, address, and website URL. These citations are often valuable for local search efforts because they provide more in-depth information about the business.
On the other hand, unstructured citations are not designed for local business listings. They can appear in blog posts, forum posts, and other forms of media. These citations can help your local SEO efforts, but they don’t necessarily have to include links back to your website.
Regardless of which citation format you choose, it’s important to ensure that your citations are correct. This means that your NAP information (name, address, and phone number) needs to be consistent across all citations. Incorrect NAP data will be flagged by Google, and your website will be less likely to be viewed as a quality search result by Google.
Having a strong citation profile is one of the easiest ways to optimize for local SEO. In fact, a Moz survey in 2018 found that citations ranked as the fifth most important ranking signal for local queries. While there are many factors that determine citation quality, the basics are clear: the more citations your business has, the more prominent it will be in local search results.
Several citation hosting sites are available to submit your citations. Some require you to register for free, while others require you to pay. You can also use an aggregator submission service to feed your NAP data to hundreds of other sites.
A local citation finder can help you find and identify citations for your business. These tools can also analyze the citations of your competitors. By doing this, you can get an idea of how you can best improve your local SEO strategy.
Broken links
Having a broken link can lead to poor SEO performance. Broken links are often caused by a host server that isn’t configured correctly, or a typo in the URL. They can also be a result of content being removed from a website. It’s important to fix broken links to ensure the user experience is a positive one.
Using a broken link tool is a great way to check for these errors. There are several free tools available online. However, you may want to use a premium service if you have a larger website.
If you find a dead link, you can choose to redirect it to a page that contains similar content. This will help improve the site’s rankings. You can choose a 301 redirect to pass the PageRank, or you can create a 30x redirect to make it look like it’s the original URL.
The Google Search Console provides a way to find broken pages on a website. This is a great tool to help you determine which links are bad and which are good.
Broken links can cause users to lose interest in your website. They can also cause a high bounce rate, which affects your rankings. Luckily, you can easily identify and fix these errors.
Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines also use dead links as a way to measure the quality of a website. The main reason this happens is that search engines don’t want to point visitors to pages that aren’t relevant to their search.
You should also be aware of the “404” error. This is a message that tells the server that a particular page can’t be found. It’s possible to fix this error by renaming the page. This will display an error page, but the actual page should still be available.
Lastly, you can run an SEO tool to see if your website has any broken links. This is the best way to ensure you’re getting the most out of your SEO efforts. While you’re at it, you might also consider checking your website for duplicate content.
Finding mentions of your brand that do not link to your website
Identifying mentions of your brand that do not link to your website is important. Aside from helping to boost search engine rankings, unlinked mentions can also drive traffic to your site. This can be a great way to gain backlinks to your site and build a larger following.
There are many tools to help you find mentions of your brand that do not link. The first tool is Google Alerts. It is free and allows you to receive email alerts whenever a certain keyword is used to describe your company or product. It can also be used to see the mentions by time, date, and source. You can customise the frequency of your alerts.
BuzzSumo is another useful brand monitoring tool. It is similar to Google Alerts, but instead of tracking mentions in the Google search engine, you can track mentions across the web. You can search by page, article, or media, or you can limit the results to specific domains or keywords. You can even export your results in a CSV file and filter them.
Ahrefs also offers a tool that helps you identify unlinked mentions. Content Explorer is a small search engine within Ahrefs that provides users with a database of almost one billion pages. It can be useful to find high-authority pages that are not linking to your website.
There are other tools that can be used to monitor online mentions, including PureLinq’s Mention Connection. It crawls thousands of sites and drafts content pitches to attract link opportunities. It also prioritizes brand mentions based on budget and other criteria.
The SEMRush brand monitoring feature can be helpful in tracking brand mentions across the web. It allows you to specify which domains or keywords will be excluded, and you can focus on a certain day or time period. You can also export your results in a CSV file, which can be filtered, sorted, and filtered again.
Monitoring brand mentions is a crucial part of your digital marketing campaign. It can help you deal with negative feedback, improve products, and maintain your reputation. It can also shape the narrative of your story and help you establish your brand as cutting-edge and thoughtful.