What we can learn from branded traffic and branded content for SEO

As a content person, you might be responsible for a variety of content –  some that talks about your product or solution directly and some that lives higher up the funnel and explores relevant topics for your target audience without talking about your product at all.

If you hire an SEO agency or just start taking SEO seriously as a strategy, you’ll quickly find yourself focusing more on the latter: improving traffic to your site for broad but relevant search terms and writing upper funnel content to attract new visitors. We do that at ércule, for example. (We’ll get into the reasons why in this post.)

But branded content, or content that directly talks about your product or brand, is likely a large and important source of traffic for you, too. Branded content is often overlooked for the purposes of SEO, but it can provide a ton of clues and opportunities for your search-optimized content strategy.

In this post, we’ll look at the ways that you can learn from branded traffic – and leverage it to improve your search performance. We’ll also talk about why we recommend analyzing traffic not in terms of branded vs unbranded, but rather as  strategic vs non-strategic.

What is branded traffic?

Branded traffic is the portion of the overall traffic to your website that comes from search queries containing terms specific to your product or company.

The people searching these queries are already familiar with your brand – at the very least, they know you exist.

In this sense, branded traffic is a measurement of brand awareness. (More on this below.)

Branded traffic vs unbranded traffic

Unbranded traffic arrives at your site from search queries that don’t include any mention of your product or branded language. When your page shows up in search results for unbranded search terms, it’s an opportunity to be discovered by people who might not know you exist and have a product or information that they’re looking for.

In this sense, unbranded traffic is a method for driving brand awareness.

Examples of branded vs unbranded search terms

One way to think of the distinction between branded and unbranded search:

• Branded search queries typically contain proper nouns (eg. “Nintendo Switch”)
• Unbranded queries rely on common nouns (eg. “gaming console”)

If it’s not totally making sense yet, here are a few examples of branded queries and unbranded alternatives that might lead you to the same place.

An increase in branded traffic: what does it mean?

The simple answer: an increase in branded traffic means that more people are looking for you by name. This is typically due to the successes of your PR, community marketing, and product teams.

Let’s dig into this a little more…

Your brand awareness initiatives are working

If you’re working on brand awareness initiatives and you’re also seeing more branded search traffic come in, it’s likely that the work you’re doing is having an impact.

For example, if you ran a Super Bowl ad, you’re probably going to see an increase in branded traffic in the first quarter of the year.

More people are using your product (and asking questions)

Companies with technical products also tend to see increases in branded search terms as their user counts increase, as more people type questions into search engines about “how to do x in [product name].”

Mistake: SEO agencies ignore branded traffic

When unbranded traffic increases, it indicates an increase in organic search performance. That’s a win for your content marketing teams. So it’s only natural for them to show more interest in unbranded traffic.

But ignoring branded traffic altogether is a mistake.

Branded traffic is also a big opportunity for your competitors

If people are typing your brand name and branded terms into Google, you want to be at the top of their search results. If not, a competitor will be happy to take your place.

Take for example a term like “Your Company vs Another Company.” If you consider branded terms as unimportant to your content strategy, your competitors may outrank you for this term.

In the following example, for the term “Asana vs linear,” neither product’s website shows up in the top 3 results for this search. Instead, ClickUp–a competitor in the space–shows up #1 with a solid product comparison. Using other companies’ branded terms, they’re able to make new people aware of their offering who may not have otherwise been considering their tool.

Not showing up for branded queries like these can mean losing traffic to competitors who are unafraid to make your brand part of their SEO strategy.

Branded content is a source of clues for your SEO strategy

Branded content (ie. landing pages, product pages, product launch posts) often ranks, not surprisingly, for a lot of branded search queries. When dialing in your search strategy, you might have a tendency to ignore these pages as “branded content.”

Using a tool like Ottimo, you can quickly comb through your library page by page and see which of your product pages or product-specific blog posts rank for which keywords.

You might be surprised that some of your most visited product pages are actually getting traffic from unbranded search terms. This is great signal! Rather than trying to “unbrand” a product-focused page, you can build an SEO companion piece targeting those same search terms. We recommend you take an approach like a more generic solutions page or blog post that addresses upper-funnel problems or concerns and cross-linking to your product-focused page or post.

Team up with product marketers on SEO

On that note… new product and feature announcements tend to be great sources of initial traffic. While product and feature launch posts are difficult to optimize for search (since they most often lead with the product and are not evergreen), they often do get search impressions for related keywords.

1password did a great job of optimizing their product feature content for search (and coordinating it with unbranded content as well).

We recommend keeping a close eye on branded posts and making friends with your fellow product marketers. They can provide you with a lot of clues into what you should be writing about higher up in the funnel and together you can build a complete launch strategy that gets a lot of eyeballs across all channels – including search.

Beyond branded vs unbranded: finding strategic signal

At ércule, we track branded and unbranded keywords and their performance for clients. But we also include a third category of analysis: strategic.

The “strategic” category includes any keywords, queries, topics, and terms that we’ve identified as relevant to your brand and audience. This can include branded and unbranded search queries alike. That way you’re keeping in mind terms like “Your Company vs Competitor” alongside important unbranded topics, too.

We recommend you focus on a variety of topics and terms as strategic to your search strategy, including:

• What you want to be known for
• What you don’t want to be know for but has volume (to position against, for example)
• Problems your product solves and use cases it supports
• Your competitors (including “vs” and “alternative” terms)
• Branded terms like conferences or open source projects you support

You can try out our topic strategy template to populate your own strategic topics along with volume, competition, and relevance data from your SEO tool. Or reach out to us – we’re happy to demo how we make this workflow seamless and accessible for our customers with Ottimo Managed.