One low-hanging source of unstructured citations is supplier pages. Lots of businesses have these. They list and link out to the companies they supply, or that supply them.
Here’s an example of one:
19 supplier page 1
You can find these quite easily in Google. Just make a list of your suppliers, find their websites, then search for something like:
site:yoursupplier.com intitle:“stockists”
site:yoursupplier.com intitle:“suppliers”
site:yoursupplier.com intitle:“clients”
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
You can also just look through their sites. It’s not usually that difficult to find these pages if they have them.
Use HARO
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) connects journalists with sources for upcoming stories. It’s free to use, and works like this:
You sign up.
You get daily email alerts with questions from journalists.
You answer a question or give a quote.
You usually get cited if they use it in their upcoming article.
It takes a bit of time and effort, but it’s a great way to get high-quality citations and links.
Use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
Since most unstructured citations include a link to the company’s website, you can find citation opportunities by checking your competitors’ backlinks.
Let’s say you run a coffee shop in London. Just enter a competing business’s domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, set it to URL mode, head to the Backlinks report, then filter for “Dofollow” links.
20 backlinks ahrefs 1
From here, it’s a case of looking for trends that might translate to opportunities. For instance, if we eyeball the report for Milk Beach, there are a lot of links and citations from lists of the best brunches in London.
21 brunch backlinks 1
Is that useful information? It depends. If your coffee shop doesn’t serve brunch, probably not. But if it does, and if your customers regularly rave about it, it might be worth getting in contact with some of these bloggers and journalists.
For example, the lady behind this blog cites her five favorite brunch locations in this article:
22 unstructured citation milk beach 1
If she hasn’t mentioned our coffee shop, it’s either because she’s never been there, or because she didn’t like it. So it might be worth sending her a friendly email, and perhaps even inviting her down for a bite to eat. If she takes us up on our offer, she might add the shop to her post or even write a standalone review.
Here’s another citation that stood out in the Backlinks report:
22 gluten free citation 1
This one comes from a gluten-free food blogger. Now, it probably wouldn’t make sense to reach out to her as she no longer lives in the UK. But assuming we have some tasty options for celiacs, we could look for other gluten-free food bloggers in London and reach out to them.