Link reclamation: Tools, tools everywhere
Every link builder, over time, starts to narrow down their favorite tactics and techniques. Link reclamation is pretty much my numero-uno. In my experience, it’s one of the best ROI activities we can use for gaining links particularly to the homepage, simply because the hard work — the "mention" (in whatever form that is) — is already there. That mention could be of your brand, an influencer who works there, or a tagline from a piece of content you’ve produced, whether it’s an image asset, video, etc. That’s the hard part. But with it done, and after a little hunting and vetting the right mentions, you’re just left with the outreach.
Aside from the effort-to-return ratio, there are various other benefits to link reclamation:
- It’s something you can start right away without assets
- It’s a low risk/low investment form of link building
- Nearly all brands have unlinked mentions, but big brands tend to have the most and therefore see the biggest routine returns
- If you’re doing this for clients, they get to see an instant return on their investment
Link reclamation isn’t a new tactic, but it is becoming more complex and tool providers are out there helping us to optimize our efforts. In this post, I’m going to talk a little about those tools and how to apply them to speed up and scale your link reclamation.
Finding mentions
Firstly, we want to find mentions. No point getting too fancy at this stage, so we just head over to trusty Google and search for the range of mentions we’re working on.
As I described earlier, these mentions can come in a variety of shapes and sizes, so I would generally treat each type of mention that I’m looking for as