Brand keywords: Stop ignoring this SEO opportunity
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence and North Star Inbound. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.
In most marketing channels, there is a distinct separation between efforts designed to increase brand awareness and those specifically aimed at customers taking action.
Brand awareness
For example, when an apparel company like Levi’s sponsors the name of the stadium where the 49ers play, they aren’t expecting people who attend or watch events to go out and buy Levi’s products immediately. Instead, they are investing in the idea that the next time a shopper makes an apparel decision involving a Levi’s product, they will give more consideration to Levi’s because of an association developed by that sponsorship.
While ultimately, the goal of this marketing investment is more sales, the effectiveness is measured by the awareness that effort was intended to increase. Most likely this would be through the use of surveys and research rather than revenue.
Action intended marketing
On the activation side of marketing, a billboard on the side of a highway that shows the camera features of the latest iPhone is intended to motivate people actually to buy that phone. The effectiveness of this ad would be measured in sales of the product in that targeted area.
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Digital PR is not the cure-all solution to all your SEO problems.
But if combined with a killer SEO strategy, it can be the extra fuel you need to boost your rankings to the next level.
This client in the beauty space started running PR campaigns with us since May last year.
We secured over 100 links in massive publications, such as The Sun, Grazia Magazine, Popsugar, Daily Mail, and lots more.
These are the three types of PR activities our team ran, throughout the year:
This same bifurcation of marketing is in play in digital advertising too, but the controls are far more granular. Every search ads account should be divided by brand and non-brand campaigns. The copy, landing page, and, of course, the desired bids will differ on whether the user has searched specifically for the brand or not.
This is so obvious for most search marketers and clients that it rarely needs to be explained. However, I am always surprised when this same level of knowledge is not applied to SEO.
Brand vs non-brand SEO
I have met many companies who have told me that they have “amazing SEO,” but when I look at their query data, nearly all of it is brand queries. Searches that contain the brand name are technically organic traffic, but this traffic is not due to any SEO efforts. The search engine is just the medium used to navigate to the website the user already wants to go to.
The intent journey between brand and non-brand search is very different and should be separate from each other, just like brand awareness and activation efforts are repeated in every other marketing channel. SEO traffic consists of two very different intent journeys; bucketing them together is wrong.
Brand search is the lowest-hanging SEO fruit
However, just because branded traffic doesn’t require strong SEO efforts, it should still not be ignored as most marketing teams do because it seems too obvious and not attractive enough to chase. This thinking is completely wrong. If your goal is revenue from search rather than rankings, these are the keywords that you should chase. (Rant: Your goal should always be revenue from searches and not clicks unless you get paid for site visits.)
You have already earned the user's awareness. Now, you must ensure that you capture that user when they seek you.
Many brand terms will have clickthrough rates higher than 50%, and if they aren’t clicking your result, they are clicking a competitor who is ranking on your brand terms. In this one area of SEO, just putting in a minimum amount of effort might be all you need to show results.
More important than SEO clicks is the conversion rate from these efforts. While non-brand traffic will have varying conversion rates depending on where people are in a buyer’s journey, branded users are always going to be much lower in the funnel. The effort that is put into these SEO efforts will pay off in revenue even if it is not high traffic.
This screenshot below is the perfect example of a missed brand search opportunity. Every click that doesn’t go to WordPress.com for their brand term is a click that could either end up on a competitor’s site or be a conversion that WordPress will now have to pay affiliate commissions to RetailMeNot.
Optimize for brand terms
With this background aside, here are five ways to find the branded terms you should optimize for:
1. Open Google Search Console and narrow it to just the home page. Filter for your brand term. Look for queries that contain the brand but have low impressions.
To improve this current visibility, put the brand term into content or create new pages. Low impressions likely mean that you are under-optimized for these terms, so correct this by optimizing for them with inclusion into the content.
2. Again, open Google Search Console and narrow it to just the home page. Filter for your brand term. Look for queries containing the brand but with high impressions but low click-throughs.
To increase effectiveness, you should make improvements to your title and/or meta description to improve the CTR. If the homepage is not a good fit, create a new page. A clickthrough rate is one of the only SEO variables that you can ever control, as you can influence why someone might click when you have a good copy in your meta description and title. (Note: these titles don’t always show up, but it’s worth the effort for when they do.)
3. Once again, open search console and EXCLUDE the home page. Filter for your brand term. Look for queries containing the brand but with high impressions but low CTR.
These are terms where you might need to create a new page, improve the existing page and/or update the metadata for the page. Branded might be a better fit for the homepage, but finding the terms that exist empowers you to put effort into the right ones.
In the example above, the WordPress’ page that is in position #2 on the query for “Wordpress discount” isn’t the right page, and a new page might be all that is needed.
4. Go to Google and do a search for your brand, BUT DON'T HIT ENTER. Make sure you are optimizing for all of those suggested queries. You can use tools for this too like answerthepublic.com or keywordtool.io to find ideas at scale.
5. Go to Google and do a search for your brand, and make sure you are optimizing for all of the “people also ask” and related queries on that search results page. These are the search terms that actual users are looking for, and terms that the algorithm has determined are closely enough related to your brand.
I have never seen a company that has fully optimized its brand, so if you follow the steps above, you will almost certainly find low-hanging fruit. As you built your SEO roadmap for 2024, start with brand and expand on non-brand when there are no more brand search opportunities.
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If your site is not performing and there are clear opportunities to apply best practices, stop wasting time looking at other sites and take an honest look in the mirror.
We have seen this repeatedly and have never seen a site that's not benefited from consistently applying best practices.
A recent example after losing traffic through 2022 algo updates and HCU.
Now:
.
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