“Stop building bonds; build your brand.”
These six words should be plastered on the desks of every SEO in the world.
In this article, I’ll explain why brand mentions are the new backlinks. Let’s dive in.
Back to the future of the brand
Almost 10 years ago, Rand Fishkin was talking about brand mentions.
That wasn’t a typo; almost 10 years ago!
Because? Well, Google itself filed a patent on the same concept.
Also, a decade ago, the PR world was abuzz with talk of the patent.
For those who don’t know, it was this section that they drooled over.
“The system determines a count of independent links for the group (step 302). A link for a resource group is an incoming link to a resource in the group, that is, a link that targets a resource in group. Group links can include express links, implicit links, or both. An express link, such as a hyperlink, is a link included in a source resource that a user can follow to navigate to a target resource. An implicit link is a reference to a target resource, for example a citation to the target resource, that is included in a source resource but is not an explicit link to the target resource.Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of ‘an implicit link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implicit link.
Known as the “Panda patent”, it introduced the concept of express links and implicit links.
express link: a hyperlink (follow or nofollow).
Implicit link: A reference to the target resource, but not a link.
Moz wrote an excellent article explaining all of this at 2014.
The logic is very simple. Google knows that people buy and sell links, so staying away from that would always be a good idea.
But the link economy is big and SEOs are stubborn. Due to the nature of SEO and the obsession with links, SEOs have been blindly ignoring marketing as an SEO tool and relying on links instead.
And of course, this has worked, without a doubt.
But we are not in 2014 anymore.
LLM and SEO in the age of AI
We all know it’s coming. Like a dark cloud on the horizon, Google will finally launch its new AI-powered search engine.
It’s like an imminent date in the future where every SEO feels like the Jedi when the Emperor unleashed Order 66.
AI is complicated; we all know that. But we also know that large language models (LLMs) are being trained on text data from the world’s most popular websites.
We also know that Google crawls the web and has its Knowledge Graph.
The text is suddenly more important because it is what forms these LLMs.
This brings us back to the importance of entities in the modern SEO landscape.
Remember that brands are entities.
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Tell people (and Google) that you exist
If I had to give one powerful piece of marketing advice, it would be this.
Focus on telling more people you exist.
It sounds simple.
However, marketing people have completely moved away from this principle and adopted a “all we have to do is get them to appear in the search engines”.
What it came down to was “all we have to do is pay the search engines to get listed”.
And this is where we’ve hung our hat for the last 10 years.
Except it doesn’t work that way.
People go to the web and end up in the messy middle of Google search.
They click, they read, they get distracted by the message they just received on WhatsApp, and then they go away, call their friend and watch Netflix.
It might be days, weeks, or months before they think, “Oh, I’ve got to sort that out,” and go back to a search engine. They click on some ads and organic listings and leave again.
Rinse and repeat, until they finally decide who they will buy from and click on your ad.
And that’s why last click attribution has taken over and seen paid search as a revenue generator.
But that tells few people you exist.
Paid search, by its very nature, seeks to reduce waste and is therefore limited in scope.
Organic search is much more powerful and reaches more people without an incremental media spend.
And beyond this advertising.
Tell large numbers of people you exist while building links and brand mentions, positioning you as the guide they need in their lives.
Beyond that are TV ads, but as we know, that’s beyond most budgets.
This is a basic superpower of advertising. it arrives
Make the news, tell people you exist and reach people who have never heard of you.
And yes, this content is crawled and indexed by Google. Know what you are, what you do and the knowledge you are bringing to others.
This is as plain and simple as it gets in EEAT terms.
The judges want an easy night
I used to be a boxer. And my old coach told me the judges wanted to have an easy night and go home.
The sport is set up for this with light colors with red and blue corners. And his coaching advice was to hit clear and crisp.
It worked and I won a lot of fights.
Google is absolutely the same.
It wants to know who you are and what you do, so that it can extract information from your site as easily as possible.
And that’s another reason why brand mentions are so powerful.
You’re giving Google clear signals about who you are, what you’re an expert at, and where to find you.
“According to the (subject matter) experts of (brand)” is an example of how the media can quote you.
But will the link matter?
Dig Deeper: Digital PR vs. Manual Link Building: Adapting to the Modern Search Landscape
Advertising first, links second
Jane Huntone of Britain’s top digital PR experts (and my boss) has a saying:
“Digital PR is the intersection of traditional PR, content marketing and SEO. We take traditional PR and content marketing techniques and fuse them with SEO strategy to generate organic search visibility i drive brand credibility and trust.”
And that’s why brand mentions are so powerful.
Because the brand comes first, before the link. But link and mention feed organic search.
Yes, everyone likes a link and they also make life easier for search users.
But it’s brand advertising that drives the link. Brands help people make decisions because we are creatures of heuristics. There are too many things to think about in today’s society and brands make decisions easier.
Traditional PR and content marketing tactics work by helping brands improve their relationship with the public and build trust.
What digital PR does is leverage these tactics for the digital age to support organic search growth.
And this trend will definitely continue.
We already see that Google favors brands, as well as media and large publications.
And brands appear in the media.
Digital PR is what fuels these functions.
And in the future of search, you want more, not less.
Brand mentions are the fuel to aim for.
Not only will you get a percentage of links, but you will also get a much higher percentage of brand mentions.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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