SEMrush Brand Monitoring Tool
SEMrush Brand Monitoring Tool
Hi Guys. I’m just going to show you the brand monitoring tool which is the 15th episode in the same rush toolbox series. First of all, I’m going to show you where to find the brand monitor tool. Under projects, you’re always gonna create a project for a website in most cases.
On the projects page, you have a number of different tools, whether it says audit, possession tracking, and various other tools that are all near right in the middle of it. You’ll be able to see brand monitoring.
Now, I’ve just finished doing the webinar, and I was late to go back over the tool, just for my own website, and just to show people how the tool works so that you’re not lost in 1 hour-long webinar. But you can check the full webinar below.
I’m going to show you the tool and how it all works. So basically you go into brand monitoring and you would add a campaign. Now, what is a campaign? So you’re going to add to your main keywords in here. You know, whatever it may be, whether it’s your brand name, whether variations of your brand name or whatever it may be.
And you can also add another five keywords in, you know, some tools, some ACO keywords, whatever it may be that is relevant to your business. You can also exclude keywords. You can exclude up to five of them. Next up mentions. Basically what you’re doing is telling SEMrush these mentions shouldn’t include these keywords. So that’s where you would put in jobs or stuff like that, that’s not really going to be relevant to you.
You can also specify a country or language, and you can also send an email report of mentions to you every week, every day, every month. You can change all the settings here. So, that’s how you would set up a campaign.
But for demonstration purposes, I’ve just put on a couple of little bits of data. Not too much, because I don’t want to blow everyone’s mind with too much information, but I just put in in a couple of key words for our SEMrush event that I was out last week, and I knew it would have a handful of mentions, no links in VD, so other bits and bobs.
Brand Monitoring Overview
This is the overview. You can see the overview here. That’s the campaign name, keywords, everything else is all self-explanatory. Over on the right-hand side, you’ve got settings where you can go in and edit your campaign and change the keywords. Email reports. You can basically change the email addresses and the frequency and everything else of the reporting for the brand monitoring tool, and you can add VD’s other campaigns if you want to run multiple campaigns. But as I see it, this is the overview.
Going for Links from Mentions
Now, the overview is going to show you web mentions, Forums and Instagram mentions. I’ve got 23 mentions from the 14th of April to the 12th of July, based on the information the upper end to SEMrush. Now, you can change this about and filter it down to other dates or whatever it may be. Dates that are more suitable for you. It will tell you the mentions, positive mentions, mentions with the highest traffic, and the total estimated reach for those mentions. Now, going down, you’ll be able to see the sentiment.
Now we’ll talk about sentiment in a minute, I’m going to come back to that. But it shows you the top domain names that mentioned me. And you see the others, ACU trade news, or, Milosh Krazinskis site, Ravens Tools, and whatever.
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There’s a Russian website. I’m not too sure what that one is. None of them has put a backlink to my websites, so normally it would show you the top backlinks you’ve got as well, but no-one sent a backlink to my website.
It will show you the main traffic and authority score as well, based on the mentions that you got from these guys. Now, I’m going to come back to the sentiments. It’s a new tool, and normally it would show you positive, negative, and neutral reviews or mentions of your brand name and stuff like that. I’m going to click on positive, and it will show what SEMrush deems as positive mentions of me. So there’s six of them, and you can scroll through here and see all of these positive mentions.
Sentiment Analysis
I’m going to change that to negative, and you’ll be able to see that I was on search engine watch, and there was a little article about me. For some reason, SEMrush is marking that as negative. Now, if you click on the negative icon you can actually change that to positive. It was a very much a positive article that probably has a few negative keywords used in there, but it’s a new tool and a new algorithm and everything else and basically by going there and updating these will help SEMrush understand what’s positive and what’s negative, so you can go in there and change that information to suit yourself. So that is what sentiment is.
Obviously, if you’ve got a lot of positive stuff that’s all good and well, where for someone maybe saying something negative about your brand, that would flag up. And if there’s something mutual, some just generic mention, it’s also important that you know that that mentions there.
Showing your Mentions?
The mentions tab is where you can go through the actual mentions. You can scour the web forums, Twitter and Instagram for mentions. And yeah, as I see, you can filter by dates, you can search for specific keywords, and mentions, and titles, and domain names or whatever it may be. You can also filter your mentions by people who have linked to you, people who have not linked to you, and you can also filter by sentiments or whether it’s positive, negative or neutral.
That has some advanced filters. The main traffic estimated reach, authority score and various other options as well. Now, why are we doing mentions? In a lot of cases, it’s quite important that you understand what people are seeing to protect your brand.
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But in most cases, people will look to faint mentions that don’t link to our website. For example, this one here, where Milosh has interviewed [Antoin 00:06:49] from SEMrush and somehow they’ve mentioned me within their article, but there’s no back link.
Using Mentions for Link Building
Now, it would be beneficial for me to send this to the link building tool, and reached out to Milosh and say, “Can you link to me, rather than just mentioned me. You may have over … You know, it may have been an oversight or whatever it may be.” But chances are Milosh is going to link back. he’ll send a link to my website.
He’s mentioned me, there was no real reason why he wouldn’t want to link to me. It could be just another oversight, or whatever it may be. So I could reach out to Milosh and use this as a link-building exercise.
But also, you know, I know Milosh personally, so it’s not a great example. But if it was a guy I didn’t know, I could reach out to him. I could potentially do some collaboration with him. Or, someone may mention your business, just talking about it in general, where it could be a potential sales opportunity. So there are loads of reasons why you may want to monitor mentions on here. But as I see in most cases, you will be doing it for back links.
Tagging your mentions
I saw there are various other options here, fast and foremost, so you can add tags here as well, so if I was to add a tag and just call it link building, op, I could use that … You know, I can tag that up as a link building opportunity.
I can also track Male Aussie’s domain name for fellow mentions of me, and if I didn’t want to get any more length from yours for one reason and another, I could simply block his domain name from appearing in my mentions tab, because I’ve already got a link from him. Or, it may be another resource that I own, or whatever it may be. So you can actually filter out these mentions, as well, so that you’re not seeing the same thing over and over again. And what is also quite important, is over on the right-hand side, you can explore all of that data if you’re trying to show it to a boss, or a client, or whatever it may be. So you can export all of this information as well. That’s the mentions tab.
Statistics Tab
Statistics. Now, the statistics here, which we’ll show you the kind of volume train for the mentions that I’ve got. If I was getting backlinks, it would also show you the backlink trends, and that’s obviously showing you that you’re going to get more mentions than you’re going to get backlinks, basically. You know, that’s always going to change. But, you can also compare campaigns as well.
So if you get multiple campaigns running I can compare a campaign, say for example from myself, which is the blue line to SEMrush that’s up there, you could do that with your competition and see who’s getting the most mentions and stuff like that, and identify that your competition is doing a hell of a lot more than you in terms of online and getting a lot of sentiment stuff going on.
And, you know, a lot of positivity about the brands on all these kind of channels. So, if you see your competition doing that, you’ll probably want to start to replicate that as well. So, you can compare this information with that of your competition, to further advance your campaign. So that’s what statistics does. It also shows you the top domain names and everything else that’s there and there.
Resources, other websites to Monitor for Mentions
Resources. You can also track other resources. For example, I added on the bbc.com here, you can add … You just simply attract resource over here into the domain name. So, I’ve set up SEMrush for my campaign. And what would happen is the tool is going to monitor SEMrush.com for any mentions of me, and that domain came up in my dashboards, and then I can reach out to SEMrush and see, you mentioned me here, you know can you link to me, or you know, thank you for the mention. I’ll just basically track progress and see what’s going on.
So you can add up to 10 other resources here as well. And you probably want to do that if you’re getting regularly mentioned on websites, or you know, big publications or whatever it may be. At the last tab here, as about the tool, it’s a fairly new tool. Not a lot of people know too much about it, but you can manage your brand reputation by following all of these kinds of steps.
And that explains what estimated reach means. It shows you what sentiment means. Tags favourite and had the domain traffic. Track domain, block domain. So it basically tells you how to use everything.
And also, on the top right-hand side, you can go to a user manual, and it will give you another overview of how you sent … You know, a more detailed explanation of how the two works. But in general, that is how the brand monitoring tool works. It’s working very well. It’s still under … It’s still being developed. You know, SEMrush is always developing their tools. But if you do have any feedback, you can also click the send feedback and suggest any changes to the brand monitoring tool that you feel would benefit you. And I’m sure SEMrush is always happy to look at good suggestions to change, further improve the tool.
But it’s a great tool. I think it’s obviously very important that you do monitor your brand. Whether that’s just for a brand reputation thing … You may have clients who want you to do reputation management services. You may use it as a link building opportunity. You may use it as a sales opportunity. It’s entirely up to yourself what you do with the data. But, I would highly recommend that you do take a look into it and use the tool to further help your business.
You can watch the full webinar below.
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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