With at least 1.88 billion websites online globally, there’s a slight chance a few might mention your brand. So, how can you best monitor your brand mentions? Here’s what I suggest.
Start with Google
Googling your brand name is the fastest way to find out what type of website your brand is mentioned on.
As many different types of websites get pulled into the Google search results as SERP features, it’s a good way to understand what websites you need to focus on as part of your website brand monitoring strategy.
google search results serp features show content
For example, if we Google “Virgin Media,” a UK broadband company, we can see that its brand is mentioned on many news websites.
For this company, monitoring website pharmacy databasementions on news websites would be important, as they have the potential to impact its online reputation.
virgin media news coverage in search results example
So, how can we monitor mentions like this? By using alerts.
Set up alerts
In my experience, Ahrefs Alerts is the easiest automated way to monitor your brand mentions across the web.
To start receiving brand mention alerts using Ahrefs:
Head to the More menu in Ahrefs
Select Alerts from the menu dropdown
Select the Mentions tab
Click + Add alert
setting up ahrefs alerts
Then:
Enter your brand name in the Search query column
Add your domain to the Exclude domains field
Set the Interval to the frequency you desire
setting up a new alert via ahrefs alerts
I’ve gone for Daily, but you can also select Weekly if you want less frequent updates.
Monitor your organic brand keywords
To monitor the exact keywords people use to search for your brand in Google, you can use the Brand filter in Ahrefs.
To do this:
Head to Keywords Explorer and enter your brand name in the search box
Go to the Matching terms report and select Branded, then hit Apply
virgin media branded keywords identification
Once you’ve done that, you can select Clusters by Parent Topic to get an overview of some of the most important keywords for your brand.
highlight of clusters by parent topic via matching
Clicking any of the keywords we can find the exact Google search results for this topic. I’m going to click on “cancel virgin media.”
clusters views via ahrefs
Clicking the keyword (or any of these keywords) takes us to the SERP Overview page—which shows Google’s top results for that keyword.
From here, we can see two things. 1) The community subdomain mostly deals with this keyword. 2) There is one Reddit thread that we probably should be monitoring—as it represents a reputational risk.
serp overview via ahrefs
Here is an example of how I would approach brand monitoring on Reddit for Ahrefs using Google Alerts. It’s as simple as entering site:reddit.com followed by your brand name.
google alerts example for tracking reddit brand me
Sidenote. If you want to monitor a different site, you can change the website and the brand name to anything else you want.
Or if your brand name is your Reddit username, you could update your Reddit User settings to include Username mentions.
tracking a reddit username mention in reddit com
Monitor your paid competitor brand mentions
We’ve talked about organic brand monitoring, but what about when websites put up ads targeting keywords with your brand name in them?
If you want to monitor your brand mentions in your competitor’s Google ads, you can do this in Ahrefs as well—and even see the exact copy they used.
To do this, enter a competitor’s domain in Site Explorer, head to the Paid keyword report, and add a Keyword filter with your brand name.
monitoring paid brand mentions using ahrefs paid
Then, to see more information about the ad, click the ads dropdown icon to reveal the Ad position history. Hovering over the colored blocks will show all the details of the ad.
ad position history report screenshot via ahrefs
Monitoring your brand on competitor ads gives you a sense of which competitors are spending the most on bidding on your brand. It also gives you an insight into which keywords they feel are valuable.
Monitoring paid brand mentions of your brand is important because competitors may bid on key brand terms and siphon off some of your brand traffic.
For example, Peter Shankman recently noticed that his competitor, Qwoted, was bidding on his brand keyword “source of sources.”