How to find SEO opportunities for brand keywords
Brand keywords will be your highest converting keywords both from the search engine and to a buyer conversion
Most marketing teams neglect to optimize for branded search terms 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. In case this isn’t obvious, your goal should always be revenue from search and not clicks unless somehow you get paid for visits to your site.
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. You must stop whatever you are doing from a non-brand effort standpoint and start optimizing for brand search.
Branded terms will have the highest CTR and also the highest conversion rates.
Here are 5 ways to find the branded terms you should optimize for:
1. Open Google Search Console and narrow to just the home page. Filter for your brand term. Look for queries that contain the brand but have low impressions. THESE ARE FOCUS KEYWORDS to either put into content or create new pages. Low impressions likely means that you are under optimized for these terms, so correct this by optimizing for them with inclusion into content.
2. Again, open Google Search Console and narrow to just the home page. Filter for your brand term. Look for queries that contain the brand but have high impressions but low clickthroughs. THESE ARE FOCUS KEYWORDS where 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 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 that contain the brand but have high impressions but low CTR. THESE ARE FOCUS KEYWORDS 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 empower you to put effort into the right ones.
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.
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 too 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 had fully optimized for their brand, so if you follow the steps above you will almost certainly find low hanging fruit.