To assess your website traffic, you can look at traffic through a “branded” vs “non-branded” lens. This would reveal how successful you are in reaching your target audience. It also provides you with insights into your traffic’s source and its possible long-term value. As such, inquiring into your branded traffic metric can be a useful venture. To help you navigate branded traffic, this article will look into what branded traffic is, how it’s measured, why it’s important, and how you can increase it.
What Is Branded Traffic?
Branded traffic refers to traffic from customers or visitors who are aware of your brand. Visitors generate branded traffic when they directly visit your website URL, access your social media channels, or make brand-related searches.
There are two types of branded traffic: Direct Branded Visits (DBVs) and Search Engine Branded Visits (SBVs). Visits made through your URL address are DBVs, while search engine queries including your brand name are SBVs. Such SBVs can include both short-tail and long-tail searches.
Branded traffic is vastly different from non-branded traffic. Non-branded traffic refers to search engine traffic from queries that don’t mention your brand name. Such searches often lead to people discovering your brand. Understanding the difference between these two can help you differentiate the two in data analytics. SEM Rush put out a great article that goes even deeper. When asking what is branded traffic and asking yourself how good of a metric it is, this article is for you!
How do you measure branded traffic?
Are you known?
There are several ways to measure branded traffic. The most popular method involves Google Search Console. To use this method, access the ‘Performance’ report for your website in Google Search Console and select the type of search you want to look into (e.g., ‘Web’). Next, add the date range of interest and click on ‘New’, then ‘Query’. You can filter these using “Queries containing”, followed by typing the shortest form of your brand name as a keyword. This will give you a summary of all data for such queries. It’s important to note that this method will display at most 999 queries. Other tools that you can use to measure branded traffic include SEMRush and Keylime Toolbox.
What is branded traffic? Is it the most important?
Gaining an understanding of your branded traffic is important, as it makes you aware of how your brand is doing. If people use your brand name in search queries often, you can gather intel on how well-known and sought-after your company is but the question is how important is it. Normally when embarking on a digital marketing campaign you obviously want people to find you when looking for you (branded), but what really separates a successful campaign is do they find you when they search for what you offer. Let’s dive a bit deeper into branded traffic.
Branded searches reveal that certain visitors are deeper in the sales funnel than others. It’s important to note that this makes them more likely to convert compared to users who base their search queries on non-branded terms.
Additionally, if visitors make branded searches, your website is likely to rank higher on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This can help you bypass any algorithm changes made in search engines. If you optimize your web page correctly, your website will show up as the most relevant result. As such, prioritizing the optimization of your website for branded search is essential for higher conversions. Your branded traffic should be very thorough on your main pages (homepage, about us etc). When it comes to non branded traffic, you want to make your service/product pages, landing pages very heavy on great content. We hope we are beginning to answer your question about, ‘what is branded traffic?”
How to make sure you rank on SBVs
To ensure that visitors who search for branded keywords are shown your website, make sure you rank for your brand name. This may seem difficult as most keywords in the English language are trademarked. As such, competition with other similar brand names may be present. There are a few ways, however, to make sure your pages rank higher on certain keywords.
Deploying your anchor text (i.e., the clickable text in a hyperlink) can help Google’s search crawlers understand what your website is about. By setting up a powerful link-building strategy for competitive keywords, you can influence Google’s algorithms. These algorithms can then conclude that your company is what people are looking for when people search for your branded keywords. As such, Google will redirect these people to your page. If all else fails, paid search can also be an avenue of interest for your company.
Once you’ve ensured that your website ranks on the first few pages of SERPS, you have to make sure Google shows users the right website pages. This involves optimizing your website so relevant pages (e.g., product pages) are revealed on SERPS rather than irrelevant pages. Tweaking title tags and meta descriptions can help you optimize this.
Ultimately, taking care of these may help redirect more users to your website when they search for your brand. It’s also essential, however, to increase the number of people searching for your brand.
How do you increase branded traffic?
There are several methods you can use to increase your branded traffic. Most of these involve increasing brand awareness through various means.
One of these involves publishing quality content on reputable websites. This can help position you as a thought leader within your industry, consequently building your company’s authority and credibility. By demonstrating your expertise using such content, you can attract new people to your brand.
Another method involves working alongside industry-relevant influencers. By leveraging the power of word-of-mouth, influencers can be a great source of brand exposure. Popular ways of finding suitable influencers include social media and influencer agencies.
Lastly, you can use online and offline paid ads to increase your brand awareness. These may lead to a spike in branded traffic.
To conclude, branded traffic is an important signifier of your general brand awareness. With a large inflow of branded traffic, you can establish yourself in your industry without having to make large investments in advertisements. As such, ensuring that you’re en route to increasing your branded traffic can pave the way for easier conversions and sales.
"What is branded traffic and is it important" additional references:
These articles may help you if you are searching, “What is branded traffic and is it important?”
