An unlinked mention used to be the thing you apologised for in a client report. It is now the thing the report should lead with.
Rob Bonham has spent over two decades in SEO across local, e-commerce, SaaS and home services, more than half of it inside agencies. Asked what he is prioritising right now, he did not name a tactic on the client’s own site:
“the biggest thing right now… is you know the like unlinked mentions, getting b you know, visibility on on other third party publications and marketplace sites is more important than ever.”
— Rob Bonham, on Unscripted SEO
Why the third party is doing the work
His worked example is a local search, but the mechanism generalises to any category where somebody is choosing between options. Ask which plumber is best nearby and the answer gets assembled from sources that are not the plumber’s website:
“It’s gonna look at Yelp. It’s gonna look at you know, maybe you know, like a home advisor or you know, other other places where that plumber might have listings across the web and they can get a a reasonable understanding of you know what what does it”
— Rob Bonham
The question being answered underneath is trust, and specifically comparative trust — is this operator trustworthy enough, relative to the others, to put at the top. Nothing you write about yourself contributes to that. Everything other people write about you does.
His conclusion is the sentence to take into a budget meeting:
“whoever whoever has you know the bigger footprint and the more people talking about them across the web in a positive way”
— Rob Bonham
What a journalist actually needs from you
Jason Berkowitz founded Break The Web and has been doing SEO since 2010. Asked what is still working while informational traffic collapses, his answer was specific about the input:
“Good off-page SEO, digital PR, link building, having good first-party data that journalists will eat up, connecting with other publications that maybe have content gaps, whatever it is. It’s still working. It’s still working well.”
— Jason Berkowitz, Break The Web, on Unscripted SEO
First-party data is the phrase that does the work. Not a quote, not a hot take, not an opinion piece — a number that exists nowhere else because your company is the only one in a position to count it. Every business is sitting on some. Very few have ever tried to publish one.
The internal problem that blocks all of this
Before you pitch anyone, find out what your own organisation has already done and forgotten to tell you. Rob’s most consistent frustration across twenty years is not technical:
“I’ll come across something, like some some sort of mention or like a press release of something cool that that the brand or organization I’ve I’m working for did and and I never heard about it”
— Rob Bonham
He diagnoses it as disconnected communication rather than incompetence. The communications team, the social media manager, whoever ran the sponsorship — none of them know what a placement is worth downstream, so nobody routes it anywhere.
A practical order of operations
- Audit what exists before you pitch anything new. Sponsorships, awards, donations, partner sites, association profiles, supplier directories. Most companies have unlinked mentions they have never claimed.
- Find one number only you can publish. Volume you handle, failure rates you see, prices you observe, a survey of your own customers. That is what gets picked up.
- Nominate one person to route the news. The single highest-leverage fix here is somebody whose job it is to forward the press release internally.
- Stop counting placements by link attribute. A followed link is better. An unlinked mention in a publication that matters is no longer a failed placement.
- Work the channels harmoniously. Rob’s car dealership example runs a sales-event landing page alongside email, paid search, paid social and organic social, hitting the same audience from every angle they might touch you on.
The uncomfortable part
Rob’s framing of who this gets harder for is worth quoting because it is the opposite of the usual pitch:
“I think the bigger your audience is, the the more important that is.”
— Rob Bonham
If you are a national retailer up against a trillion-dollar competitor, standing out positively somewhere other than your own site is not a nice-to-have. It is the only place the comparison is being made.
Quotes are verbatim from the raw Riverside transcripts, trimmed only for false starts and filler. More at White Label Experts and Unscripted SEO.