Content strategies that index on SEO are historically focused on increasing website traffic for unbranded keywords, or keywords that don’t include a company or product name. The strategy looks something like this: First, you identify unbranded search terms that are both relevant to your business and (ideally) high volume. Then, you write a lot of upper funnel content that you hope ranks for those terms in organic search. The goal is to attract new visitors to your site who may have never heard of your solution before.
If you’re myopically focused on increasing unbranded keyword rankings, you’ll be missing a lot. Branded search and its subsequent traffic (”branded traffic”) is becoming increasingly important for SEO and LLMs in ways that we’re discovering daily. Further, branded traffic is often overlooked for the purposes of SEO itself and can provide a ton of clues and opportunities for a comprehensive 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 overall search performance across both search engines and LLMs. 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 for these terms already know you exist.
In this sense, branded traffic can act as a measure of brand awareness. With the rise in usage of LLMs for product research, brand exposure is increasingly important. Branded traffic is one element of a comprehensive approach to measuring brand awareness that can help you better surface in the right conversations at the right times.
What is non branded traffic?
Non branded traffic is site traffic from search queries that don’t include any mention of your product or terms related to it. When your site shows up in search results for non branded search terms, it’s an opportunity to have your product or solution newly discovered by people who might not know you exist.
Increasing nonbranded traffic is a method for increasing brand awareness, the ultimate goal of which is converting these visitors to customers.
Branded vs unbranded search queries
Branded search queries include product or company names, like “Rayban sunglasses”, or “Toyota Tacoma.” Non branded search terms don’t use specific product names. For example, someone might type a term like “polarized sunglasses” or “mid-size truck” as a search term.
Measuring branded vs unbranded traffic
There are several ways to understand how much traffic to your site is coming from branded vs unbranded terms. At ércule, we combine Google Search Console and Google Analytics data in a Looker Studio dashboard to see the m/o/m change across both. We recommend understanding the baseline for branded vs unbranded traffic before attempting to impact either number. Other keywords tools, like Semrush, also provide ways to analyze branded vs unbranded traffic as well as branded vs unbranded keyword rankings.
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.
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].”
Branded traffic is 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. Owning the narrative is key, and also an advantage as LLMs increasingly ingest first page results from top product queries in their own product research, alongside other sources like G2 and Gartner. (Side note to make sure you’re always taking a multi-channel approach to how you think about your brand in the modern world of search!)
Branded content is a source of clues for your SEO and AEO 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 the ércule app, 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
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 eyes across all channels—including search.
Using branded traffic signals to improve website journeys
Branded traffic can also give you clues into improving your website’s journey for users coming from search. Often branded queries will result in traffic that lands on pages that are less than ideal for the presumed intent. By analyzing what queries are landing branded traffic where on your site, you can fill important content gaps and help users have an optimal experience from the time they land on your site. Here is a common workflow I use for this:
- Filter in Google Search Console Search Performance→Search Results for queries that include your product or company name. This will return a list of queries that are resulting in clicks or impressions on Google.
- Look across these queries to see if there are any relevant modifiers that people are regularly searching for. Are they trying to find your docs? Are they asking about how you compare to competitors? Are they wondering if you work with a particular technology or have a certain capability?
- For any interesting queries with clicks, look at what pages they’re landing on. Is this where you’d want them to land? Do you need a piece of content more specific to what they’re asking?
I’ve used this workflow to identify and address pretty substantial gaps in website user journeys, from missing content to misleading landing pages. Anyone who is landing on your site from a branded query is already aware of your solution, so landing them on a page that maps to their intent and lends itself to answer their questions as soon as possible is definitely in your best interest!
Using this data for AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
While we’re on the topic of using branded traffic data to answer people’s questions, let’s look at how this applies to AI answers through platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google AI Overviews.
It’s no secret that people are using platforms like Perplexity and LLM-driven chat interfaces like ChatGPT and Claude to find answers—more than ever before. Google’s AI Overviews and future AI mode are changing the way we use Google, too. Increasingly it’s important to look beyond optimizing for search engines, and optimizing instead for anywhere people might be looking for answers. Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO, can also benefit from branded traffic signals.
The Google Search Console workflow I use (it will look familiar from the previous section!):
- Filter in Google Search Console Search Performance→Search Results for queries that include your product or company name. This will return a list of queries that are resulting in clicks or impressions on Google.
- Look across these queries to see if there are any relevant modifiers that people are regularly searching for.
- Consider the potential intent for these queries and build FAQs for their most relevant landing page (or entire blog posts that can be surfaced on high traffic pages.)
This approach has a lot of similarities with the former section, but in the former section you’re focusing on how humans navigate the content. For AEO, it’s important to consider a machine-first approach, which sometimes has faster options for execution. My favorite of these options is adding FAQs to high traffic landing pages. How you write these FAQs will differ depending on if the majority of traffic to the page is branded vs unbranded traffic, but it’s not a bad idea to have a good mix of content for ingestion across your FAQs. Using a structured format like the one found at schema.org/FAQPage is also recommended for optimal visibility.
Generating ideas for AEO with LLMs
If the above approaches feel complex, or you want a thought partner to help you generate ideas, you can send your (anonymized) Google Search Console query results to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to provide you with some recommendations. Example ChatGPT prompt:
Look at the following data pasted from a Google Search Console Export. These are branded queries where the term Product has been substituted for my product name to maintain anonymity. Consider what FAQs I might add to my site to help LLMs and AI-driven answer engines better find and surface my product. Include ideas for what FAQs and content I might produce to better answer humans’ potential questions.
If you’re willing to share what your website is, you can also add things like:
Consider what content I should add to my blog that would fill any gaps in my site content to better address user queries and help llms find information faster.
Review the pages on my site and determine what FAQs based on the query data should be added to which pages across the docs, blog, and other pages.
Going beyond branded vs non branded: strategic traffic
At ércule, we track both branded and unbranded keyword 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. And please, reach out if you have questions! The world of SEO is changing fast, and we’re constantly evolving how we think about these topics (and how AI can help us accelerate our progress).
