SEO Brand - what it is and how to measure it

What is SEO Brand

SEO Brand represents the part of your SEO (aka Organic Search) traffic that originated from people searching for (eg on Google) for your brand name (and often its many variations). SEO Brand is sometimes also referred to as Navigational Queries (as people search for these queries on search engines in order to navigate through to your site). The opposite of SEO Brand is called SEO Generic. People who visit your site using brand queries are people who are somehow already familiar with your brand (they are often existing customers). Therefore SEO Brand tends to have much higher conversion rate compared to your other traffic sources. It is very important to split your SEO traffic into SEO Brand and SEO Generic (aka non-brand), as these represent two entirely different types of audience.

Example

Let’s say your business is called “Neil Search”. When looking at your Search Console queries data, you might see the following SEO Brand queries:

• neil search (SEO Brand)

• neil search ltd (SEO Brand)

• neil search consultancy (SEO Brand)

However these would be considered as SEO Generic queries:

• search consultancy (SEO Generic)

• search consulting company (SEO Generic)

• consulting company in London (SEO Generic)

Obviously there might be sometimes also more ambiguous queries with no clear distinction between Brand and Generic. In which case simply make sure that categorise queries in a consistent and easy to understand manner.

Characteristics of SEO Brand traffic

• SEO Brand queries are typically used by your returning customers

• SEO Brand shows much higher conversion rate than your other (non brand) traffic sources

• SEO Brand traffic tends to land on the homepage, as opposed to on your other landing pages (something you can easily check using Search Console data)

• SEO Brand shows very similar characteristics to PPC Brand and Direct traffic (all three represent very similar group of customers)

• SEO rankings of SEO Brand tend to be very strong (you are likely to appear on positions 1, 2 and 3 for your brand terms)

Why you should measure SEO Brand

• Keeping an eye on your SEO Brand figures can help you to access impact of your Brand campaigns.

• Also, measuring SEO Brand Impressions over time is a great way to understand your Brand Awareness over time.

• Splitting SEO traffic into the different keyword categories makes understanding of the drivers of your SEO growth (or lack thereof) more achievable. The most important split is isolating SEO Brand from SEO Generic, although even more granular split of SEO Generic is strongly advised.

• SEO Brand terms can tell you a lot about the intent of your returning visitors (are they visiting because they want to make a complaint, download a guide, or contact you). You can use this information to create even more useful content, or identify issues that your customers face.

How to track and report on SEO Brand (traffic and Sales)

1) Use Google Search Console queries data to isolate SEO Brand from SEO Generic to get:

• SEO Brand Impressions

• SEO Brand Clicks

• SEO Brand Position & CTR

2) Use Google Analytics Landing Pages data to get:

• SEO Brand Visits (estimate)

• SEO Brand Conversion Rate (estimate)

• SEO Brand Sales (estimate)

  An important clarification here. As getting Organic keywords data in Google Analytics is not possible (as Google hides almost all organic keywords), you need to use a workaround instead. The workaround will not give you 100% correct data, but in most cases it will be at least 90% correct.

  First you need to figure out on which pages your SEO Brand clicks land on (you can get this data from Google Search Console). It is very common to see 90-100% of SEO Brand queries landing on the homepage. And if that is the case, you can very easily get your SEO Brand Visits, Conversion Rate and Sales from the Landing Pages report in Google Analytics, making sure you filter for Organic Search channel. This approach of measuring Organic Brand conversion rate and Sales is feasible for most websites. This solution will not be so great for the few companies of which SEO Brand queries are scattered across many different pages (however this is not something that often happens).

3) Combine data from the two sources and build a very powerful SEO Brand report (or use similar approach to built an Ultimate SEO Report not limited to just SEO Brand but covering all query categories which will allow you to have a very solid understanding of your SEO audience and your SEO performance at a vert granular level).

Which reporting tools to use to build an SEO report

a) Google Data Studio - Free, quick and easy to setup, and zero maintenance required. Or you can hire an SEO Analytics expert to set it up for you.

The limitation of Data Studio would be the fact that it cannot handle very large volume of data (so if you are getting millions of visits to your site each month, it might be safer to go for one of the solutions listed below). Another limitation is the fact that by using Data Studio on its own you will be dependent on the data available in Search Console (and that is limited to a maximum of 16 months, meaning that you wont be able to do track long terms growth rates). Data Studio is still however a very good solution for many small to medium size companies.

b) Google Sheets - Free, fairly quick and easy to setup, and no maintenance required. To make this work you would first need to install Search Analytics add-in (free) in your Google Sheets. By using the add-in you will make sure you are getting big chunk of the Search Console data (as opposed to the Data Studio connector which may without you even knowing cut a lot of the data before it gets into the reports). Should you need a hand, you can hire an expert to guide you through the steps it or even set the report up for you.

c) Excel - inexpensive, quite scalable (can handle even millions of rows if setup correctly), requires little maintenance, a favourite choice for all the Excel fans. Having your SEO data in Excel also means it becomes easier to consolidate it with your other/existing reports. There are two major parts of setting up an SEO report in Excel

• getting the data (in the most automated manner, ideally using some sort of an Excel plug-in such as SEO Tools for Excel)

• setting up the report structure and building visualisations

  An example SEO Report in Excel can be downloaded from here. It covers quite detailed, page and keyword level SEO Data. As it uses Power Pivot, its functionalities will fully work only on Windows computers (Mac does not support Power Pivot).