If you do, you’ll no doubt find these people divided into two camps. There will be those who tell you that link building is still critical in 2021 and those who tell you that link building is deader than the proverbial dodo. So…who’s right?

“They say that there’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about. As an SEO consultant, I work within a fairly small, niche industry, so word-of-mouth is hugely important. While I value links from high-quality people, I seek out brand mentions as these are the holy grail for my business.”

Lukasz Zelezny, international SEO consultant at SEO.London

While there’s no doubt that gaining great, high-quality links can be useful, it’s also clear that the world — and the internet — is changing. In the not-too-distant past, dummy websites containing nothing but links littered the internet. There was nothing we could do to stop them from getting away with it until, that is, Jagger came along.

No, not the guy with the lips and hips, but Google’s rock star update which, from September 2005 on, would spoil the fun for those committing linkage crimes. The Jagger update analyzed the anchor text of an inbound link, the content on the linking page, and the speed at which links were coming from the page. This innovation forced “link farms” to remove their sketchy websites if they wanted to avoid a Google penalty.

From that moment on, quality link building became a major marketing strategy for businesses and individuals alike. Everyone began to understand the huge benefits.

Because time stops for no man — and neither does Google — the slightly jaded Jagger was unseated in 2016 by the real-time rollout of the Penguin update. Penguin prevented the kind of spammy linking that annoyed everyone. It was closely followed by the revolutionary PageRank Updated, yet another Google initiative designed to stop the bad guys in their tracks.

That was then, this is now.

After a tumultuous year, we now have our feet firmly planted in 2021 and, once again, link building is a big part of the conversation.

We’ve all been taught to follow a simple formula when assessing the value of internet content.

• Links = Trust.
• Lack of links = Lack of trust.

Although this formula may have been relevant in the recent past, the internet is changing.

These days, rather than merely a collection of pages and links, the internet is becoming a vast ecosystem with multiple ways of reaching out and communicating. Because of this, many feel that links are falling out of favor and that unlinked brand mentions are the way forward when it comes to boosting SERP presence.

“Building relationships is an important part of my business and, because of this, I work hard to collect brand mentions. Although these don’t link to my business site, they mean that my name is getting out there. Every time my name crops up, it improves my ranking and my industry profile.”
Szymon Slowik, managing director at Taka Oto Consulting SEO agency in Poland

Connecting, but without the links.

Also known as an “implied link,” a brand mention refers to those times when your brand, product, or service is referenced by another company or organization on the world wide web but — and here’s the kicker — no link to your company is included.

These mentions may happen within an article, blog post, or even a post on social media. This is usually done by a company that wants to present itself as high authority to Google but doesn’t want to link to your company either out of respect or simply because they don’t want their content to be full of links.

Check out how Casey Markee is mentioned as an SEO expert in this screen capture. However, the author did not link to Casey’s website or social media page. “That’s great,” I hear you sigh, “but I want endorsement which improves my ranking, so I need links.” To that, I’ll reply “Not true, and here’s why.”

Come to mention it…

We all know that Google and other search engines use links to calculate the value of a website or page and rank it accordingly. What you may not know is that these search engines do the same for brand mentions.

Both Google and Bing have confirmed this is the case. At SMX West in 2016, Bing’s Duane Forrester said, “Years ago, Bing figured out context and sentiment of tone, and how to associate mentions without a link. As the volume grows and the trustworthiness of this mention is known, you’ll get a bump in ranking as a result.”

If you need any further evidence, Google confirmed this strategy. Their Search Quality Guidelines read, in part, “For Page Quality Rating, you must also look for outside, independent reputation information about the website. When the website says one thing about itself, but reputable external sources disagree with what the website says, trust the external sources.”

Heard it through the grapevine.

It’s clear that brand mentions or unlinked mentions help you get where you’re going SEO-wise. Your business can get on board by making this a solid part of your strategy. Below are five tips for getting started.

1. Track and Trace

For starters, you need to come up with a system that will allow you to track your brand mentions. You can do this a couple of ways:

• Sentiment Analysis. Sentiment analysis tools such as Brand24 collect all of your brand mentions and bundle them up with a cumulative score of negative, neutral, or positive. You also can respond and otherwise react quickly to any negative mentions which start to show up.
• Alerts. Tools such as Google Alerts serve as a great backup for sentiment analysis tools as they’ll send you an email every time your brand or product name pops up anywhere on the internet.

2. Check Reviews

You should, of course, be encouraging your customers to leave reviews of your business as a standard practice but, if not, now’s the time to start. Actively soliciting reviews and ratings can be incredibly effective in terms of brand mentions. As always, it’s a good idea to keep a consistent eye on them to spot and deal with anything that’s creeping into negative territory.

3. Get Social

It’s hard to overstate the importance of engaging with your audience on social media. These days, social media is where your customers live. It’s not enough to post advertisements once a week, either. You need to jump in with both feet and join the conversation to keep those brand mentions flowing.

An ongoing commitment to social media means talking directly with customers, responding super-fast to questions, and hosting surveys and competitions. When customers feel valued, they’re quick to tell friends and family about your products and services. Put consistent, friendly social media support at the top of your list.

4. Snoop

Your primary concern should always be the brand mentions your business is getting. However, keeping tabs on your competitors will also yield a tremendous amount of insight. Make it a part of your ongoing strategy to keep an eye trained on the mentions your competition is getting. Use those insights to compare your successes and failures against those of others.

5. Influence

Social influencers are still a thing in 2021, but the trend is toward normal, everyday people and away from celebrity endorsements. You can search around for influencers for your brand or even find them among your existing customers on social media. Happy customers make excellent brand ambassadors!

For Now, It’s Best to Hang Onto Both Worlds

While there’s absolutely no doubt that brand mentions are the future in terms of SEO, this doesn’t necessarily mean that links are gone for good.

Forging strong relationships through link building can be an effective part of your digital marketing strategy and certainly shouldn’t be dismissed completely. Instead, a two-part strategy with brand mentions and links will most definitely prove to be the winning combination for 2021.

The post Link Building: Why The Future May Be Linkless appeared first on Relevance.

What is sentiment analysis and how does it work?

Simply put, sentiment analysis is the process of determining whether a statement is positive, negative, or neutral. Some of the more sophisticated algorithms are able to discern emotions like sadness, happiness, angriness, indifference, skepticism, etc.

Sentiment analysis requires a dataset to work upon. Collecting mentions of various keywords online is one way to access data. There are softwares that can help you do this and will store the information in one place. Then, looking at the statements, algorithms classify each one of them as positive, negative, or neutral on the basis of lexicons, machine learning, NLP technology, and so on.

Social media proved to be the best and largest source of mentions. These are often the most telling, as the comments are made by your customers or members of your community. Still, gathering mentions from other places like blogs or press releases is also useful, as it can tell you what the press and authors think about you or your brand.

The scale is easily divisible so that distinguishing between a mildly positive comment and a totally enthusiastic one is possible. For instance, somebody might call your product “pretty good,” while someone else might praise it as “the best.” The scale allows for assigning a sentiment score to each statement.

Possible challenges

While this is an excellent piece of technology, it’s worth noting that sentiment analysis is not free from some drawbacks.

Negations

This can prove to be difficult, as certain types of negations may fool the algorithms. While straight-up negations are easy to assign a sentiment to, things like double negations might prove problematic. Sentences like this one:

The sentiment is obviously positive, but the algorithm might think otherwise.

Sarcasm

Sarcastic statements are often mistakenly taken as real opinions even by humans. Machines are even worse at associating a sentiment with them.

Multipolarity

It’s pretty common to see statements that contain both positive and negative words. Again, this sort of sentence is challenging for the software.

Ambiguity

Sometimes, words have a different meaning depending on the context, which not always can be determined:

Positive (scary)

Negative (scary)

How to use sentiment analysis in digital marketing (and why)?

Market research

There are two primary ways of doing market research, and these are qualitative and quantitative. The former focuses on experiences, social and historical meanings, and political or collaborative perspectives. In essence, qualitative research investigates how people feel — it’s entirely subjective. Whereas the latter consists of the analysis of hard data to find out what’s the general statement.

These two schools have their ups and downs. On the one hand, qualitative research is thought to be invalid by some. On the other hand, quantitative research is said to be merely useful to reinforce current paradigms, not discover new ones. Now, sentiment analysis can be seen as a combination of the two.

As a marketer using sentiment analysis, you’re presented with valid customer opinion, actionable insights, and thoughts. Analyzing them can be rapid, as tools currently do all of the calculations in a matter of seconds, so you don’t waste any of your time on that.

Another advantage of sentiment analysis is the fact that customers don’t really know that their statements are being gathered. This eliminates the possibility of them reacting differently due to them being informed of such a process. You could say that the opinions are as close to reality as you can get since you’re gathering them from a natural online environment.

You get to find out what people think about virtually any aspect of the market: products, brands, industries, objects, places, etc. Identifying current market and industry trends can prove to be immensely useful for your marketing strategy.

“We’ve been using sentiment analysis for our market research efforts for quite some time now, with astounding results. Since we’re one of the major software houses in Poland, we need to be on the lookout for any IT trends and the sentiment associated with them. That way, we can always be on top of new technology and establish the direction we are going to grow towards more conveniently.” comments Jack Zmudzinski, a senior associate at software development company Future Processing.

Competitor analysis

Monitoring keywords associated with your competitors allows you to peer into the opinions about them. This can give you valuable insights into their strategies and help you find customers who could benefit from your services. 

For instance, you see that there’s a buzz concerning one of your opponents because you’re alerted of a sudden drop in sentiment about their brand. Now, you can react to that by answering the concerns of your competitors’ customers and promote or advocate your brand.

Product and brand monitoring

In essence, you’re simply analyzing what the sentiment of your brand is. This can allow you to mitigate any PR crisis seeing that you can react to them almost immediately. Finding out what people think about you can lead to new insights and possibly help you devise a marketing tactic. 

Assessing whether a buzz around one of your marketing activities or new products is positive or negative improves your knowledge by a significant margin. You get to see for yourself people’s response concerning whatever you’re doing. This is tremendously useful for the growth strategies of your brand, such as brand reputation management, product development, or predictive analysis.

Assessing trends

“Looking into the current trends can help you find insight as to what you should write about them. If you’re a shoe company, and the majority of your audience thinks that using real leather for shoes is bad, you shouldn’t break out with a positive statement about that. Sentiment analysis can help you with staying on top of any major buzzes and reacting to them appropriately” remarks Max Babych, CEO at SPDload.com

With sentiment analysis, you could identify new trends that nobody from your competition has yet picked up on and be the first one to describe or give an opinion about. This reinforces your position as an expert in the industry. 

Recap: Sentiment Analysis in Your Digital Marketing

As you can see, sentiment analysis has quite a bit of use for marketers. Communication with your customers becomes much easier and more adequate if you know exactly what they think. You get to be more accurate with your content and marketing strategies as well.

While sentiment analysis is certainly not yet perfect, the longer the algorithms function, the more accurate they get. This could be a good time to jump on the bandwagon and start using it to your advantage. There’s a lot to gain from utilizing sentiment analysis, and the chances are that this could be the missing ingredient for you to overtake your competition.

The post How To Utilize Sentiment Analysis In Digital Marketing appeared first on Relevance.