In this video, I’m going to show you 5 effective
real-time alerts that’ll help you get more backlinks.
Stay tuned.
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What’s up guys?
It's Sam Oh here with Ahrefs and I’m super excited for today’s tutorial.
Throughout this tutorial, I’ll be using Ahrefs’ Alerts tool to set up 5 passive
real-time notifications that I think everyone should be using.
Now, all of these alerts have one purpose and that’s to find new and relevant link
prospects with as little effort as possible.
Now you might be wondering how monitoring keyword mentions in new articles can help
you get backlinks.
The thing with marketing, particularly, link building is that timing is a critical component
in successful outreach.
So, the sooner you can reach out to someone from the time that they publish their article,
the higher your chances will be to get a link placement.
So with that in mind, let’s jump right in.
The first alert we’re going to create is the "brand mentions alert."
So go to the Alerts tool from the menu bar.
Next, click on the “mentions” tab and then the “Add Alert” button.
This is a great way to find unlinked mentions of your company’s name.
So anytime someone mentions your brand, but doesn't link to your site, you can reach out
to them and just ask them for the link.
It’s also a highly effective way to start building relationships with influencers and
journalists who are talking about your company.
And on the other spectrum, you can monitor sites that are giving you bad press.
Here, you need to enter in a search query that you’d like to monitor.
So, rather than creating a separate alert for different variations of your brand name, you
can set up a single alert by using the "OR" search operator.
For our website, we might put “ahrefs” OR “ahrefs.com” OR, common misspellings
like “a hrefs” OR “aherfs.”
And it’s important to note that when using search operators in your query, you must use
uppercase letters on the operator since they are case sensitive.
When setting the mode, you can choose to search everywhere, just in the title, or only within
the body content.
So, for this alert, I recommend searching everywhere.
We’ll leave the language setting to all languages
and for blocked domains, we’ll actually block our own domain since we don’t need
to get alerts from our own site.
For recipients, you can add people on your team like an outreach manager or maybe a client
who wants to do their own outreach.
Finally, you can choose the interval to get the alerts.
There’s real-time or a daily or weekly summary.
So, we’ll choose real-time.
Finally, we’ll save it.
Now anytime someone mentions any of these keywords within their content, we’ll get
an email where we can check if they added a link to our site with the brand mention.
And if they didn’t, we can just send them a friendly email and ask for the link.
One other thing to mention is that you can track your branded product keywords in here.
So for example, if Apple were to add in their company name, you know, they’d get a lot
of irrelevant results.
So instead, they could track branded keywords like iPhone, iPad, Macintosh, and a phrase
match like Apple TV.
Recently, we’ve been thinking about adding in a super cool feature that will automatically
detect if the web mention is linked or not.
So if you want to see that feature added to the Alerts tool, then make sure to leave a comment.
While we’re waiting for some cool sites to mention us, let’s move on to the second
alert, which is what I like to call the “The Intruder Technique.”
The principle behind this alert is to find websites that are mentioning two of your direct
competitors, but not you.
Here’s how it’s done.
If Mailchimp wanted to monitor sites that are talking about their competitors, but not
mentioning their tool, they could achieve this by using boolean operators.
For example, their search query might look like this:
+aweber +activecampaign -mailchimp.
This search query would alert Mailchimp every time a website mentioned both Aweber and Activecampaign
but not Mailchimp.
They could then reach out to the site owner to “intrude” in on the party, right?
Now, this is an awesome alert to find prospects that you can send samples to, give free trials,
find new affiliates, or just to bring your company to their attention.
And again, we're just going to leave the settings as the same as we did before.
So far, we’ve covered a couple cool company/brand mentions.
But you don’t need to limit yourself to your company’s name or branded product names.
The next alert is the “related keywords alert”.
At Ahrefs, one of our tools is Site Explorer, which is well-known as our backlink checker.
Then we have Keywords Explorer which is our keyword research tool and we also have
“Rank Tracker” which checks your Google search rankings continually over time.
Since people aren’t always searching for our branded product names as much as they
are these related terms, we can set up an alert to find content mentions that are highly
relevant to our products.
So for our search query, I’ll type an open bracket, "backlink checker" OR "keyword research
tool" OR "rank checker" close bracket, and then -ahrefs.
We’ll leave the rest of the settings as we did in the previous examples and click
the save button.
You could also use this for general keywords that are highly related to your niche.
For example, at Ahrefs, we might search for something like title:“SEO Tools”,
which I’ve set as a phrase match, -ahrefs.
These alerts will open up opportunities to introduce our tool to bloggers and influencers
and potentially get links to our product pages, which are generally tougher links to get through
other link building tactics.
Alright, onto the last one for our mentions alerts, which I call, “recruit the hype man."
The idea of this alert is to find people who are reviewing your competitor’s products
and services and then to recruit them to promote your products.
So, for this example, we could do a search like this:
Title, colon, open bracket, your competitor’s name, so I’ll use Salesforce as an example,
space, review and close the bracket.
And this will mostly send us real-time alerts when content creators have done a full-blown
review on a similar competitor.
So we could reach out, offer trials and have our products reviewed by experts and evangelists
in our industry.
For each of these alerts that you create, you’ll get an email notification based on
the set interval that you choose.
And the beauty of these keyword trigger alerts is that you can get as creative as you want
and create hyper-targeted real-time alerts so you’ll never miss an opportunity to get
your name out there.
Now, since the mentions alerts will only start sending you new notifications from the time
that you add it, you can go to Content Explorer, which shares the same database as the Alerts
tool, and use the exact same search queries to find existing mentions.
For example, if I wanted to check the "intruder technique" example, I could type in the search query,
+aweber +activecampaign -mailchimp, and run the search.
Next, I’ll click on the “one link per domain” feature since we don’t want to
pitch the same site multiple times.
Then, I’ll click the “highlight unlinked domains” drop down and in this case, I’ll
type in mailchimp.com since in our search query, we’re looking for pages that have
mentioned a couple other email marketing tools, but not theirs.
If we scroll down a bit, you can see this one on starting a fitness blog which mentions
the two competitors, but not Mailchimp.
And the highlighted domain in yellow tells us that this website has never linked to MailChimp
before, which makes them a great prospect for outreach.
If we scroll back up to the top, you can also use this date filter here and see only the
mentions in the last 7, 30, 90, or whatever date range you want to check.
So if I filter for the last 30 days, then you’ll see this recent post called, “List
of Best Email Marketing Platforms,” which also has never linked to Mailchimp.
When you’re setting up your mentions alerts, I highly recommend testing your search queries
with Content Explorer first to make sure that you get relevant results sent to your inbox.
So everything we’ve covered so far are keyword mentions alerts.
But there’s one last alert that will help you find new link opportunities.
And you might already be using this one because it seems so obvious, but let me cover it anyway,
just in case you missed it.
The last alert you should use is one that helps you spy on your competitor’s fans.
Alert number 5 is the Linkerati Alert.
If we click on the backlinks tab here, then we can create a new alert by clicking on this button.
Next, we need to enter in the domain or URL of a competitor we want to track.
Setting this as a domain search will likely leave you with an overwhelming amount of junk links.
So I recommend using either a URL to the homepage or to an individual article to get relevant results.
For example, if I had a blog on body building, then the kind of homepage URLs that I would
be looking for are ones similar to muscleandbrawn.com, which talks mainly about power lifting and bodybuilding.
Now, a homepage link that I would avoid putting in here is something like menshealth.com.
While they do talk about similar topics, they cover a lot of other topics that would likely
send me irrelevant backlink notifications.
But I could track this page called “The 10 Best Back Workout Moves,” which may be
relevant to an article that I’m building links for on an ongoing basis.
So I would copy and paste this URL in here, make sure that the mode is set to URL and since
I want daily alerts, I’ll leave the interval as is and click the “add” button.
Now, each time you get a notification, you can contact relevant link prospects, quickly
introduce your products or content and start getting more backlinks to your website.
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.
Make sure to hit the thumbs up button and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
Now, I know that I only covered 5 alerts here and as you saw, you can come up with thousands
of different combinations using search operators.
So I want to hear from you.
Leave a comment and let me know which alert was your favorite on the list?
Or if I missed a good one, I’d love to hear from you and our smart marketing community
so that everyone can grab a quick win.
So until the next video, keep grinding away and I’ll see you soon.
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