Branded search for news SEO
Here’s how branded search helps measure your site’s audience loyalty, brand awareness and how to uncover valuable insights
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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie here, back from a busy WTF is SEO? week! Last weekend, Shelby and I were lucky enough to present at NASH, Canada’s biggest student journalism conference. Then, last week, we gave a talk on AI and search at Ignite 2025, a one-day conference looking at the future of digital media publishing. Oh — and we had our biggest community call ever last week on Google Discover. We are: blessed and busy.
This week: Branded search for publishers! Here’s how branded search helps measure your site’s audience loyalty, brand awareness and how to uncover valuable insights. Find out how to track and analyze branded keywords as part of your news SEO strategy.
Missed our community call? Find the recording here and a key takeaways post here.
Let’s get it.
In this issue:
What is branded search?
Why branded search matters
Understanding branded search
How to find your branded terms
THE 101
What is branded search?
Branded search is all about looking up a company or organization by name. For news SEO, that’s all queries about a publication.
Branded keywords are phrases directly associated with your organization, used by audiences to find information about the publication. They are usually navigational queries, as readers look to go to your homepage or specific pages on your site.
Non-branded search includes all other queries. For publishers, that’s generally news-y terms (“pope francis critical condition”) and evergreen searches (“best thrillers 2025”).
The key difference between branded search and non-branded search is user intent, or the why behind a query. For non-branded terms, readers are looking for any publication’s coverage of a topic, whereas branded search reflects an interest in a specific outlet’s content.
Branded keywords, therefore, are really valuable to your site for audience analysis and insights.
Branded searches typically include brand names, product names, misspellings and well-known entities (people/authors) associated with your organization.
Brand names would include searches like “the athletic”, “guardian news” or “globe and mail”;
Product or service names might include “wordle” for The New York Times, or “today, explained” for Vox;
Misspellings of your brand or products are common, too (we’re not all great at typing 🙃);
Well-known people associated with your brand, including names of columnists, like ”rob carrick” for The Globe and Mail, “ezra klein” for The New York Times or “marina hyde” for The Guardian.
The click-through rate (CTR) for branded queries is often very high: up to 50 per cent of people click the first link on search results for a branded search. Branded search presents a valuable opportunity for publishers to optimize their outlet for the keywords they are closely associated with.
Why branded search matters
Branded search reflects really active interest in your publication. People searching for “wordle” aren’t interested in just any word game — they’re interested in the one with five letters and six guesses from The New York Times. That is active interest from a middle- to bottom-of-the-funnel (aka loyal) audience — aka, the people we want returning to our sites.
Generally, traffic from branded keywords will be consistent or slowly increasing over time. That’s because the use of branded queries is mostly habitual — performing the same action to get the same result. If branded search is growing, that likely means awareness of your organizing is increasing and should lead to higher search traffic overall.
Tracking the trendline of branded searches — for example, are people looking up "nyt news" more or less compared to last year? — shows how much readers value your site.
Branded search can also reveal what topics readers most associate with your publication. This can help determine what coverage areas are of most interest to loyal readers.
For example, growing interest in “your brand + topic” signals that readers find your reporting credible and are actively seeking it.
“your brand + Trump” can suggest an increased appetite in your political coverage;
“your brand + RRSP deadline” shows readers trust your personal finance coverage, and tax season is an opportunity to double down on this. Review traffic data from the previous year for pillar content to recycle, and Google Trends/other keyword research tools for ways to expand the coverage;
“your brand + the name of a product, vertical or staff name” typically reflects high engagement with a specific area of your site, like a podcast show, but could also indicate issues with your internal navigation.
Doubling down on coverage areas readers already associate with your brand — and are actively seeking out on their own — can foster audience growth and potentially boost traffic.
When a page brings in significant search traffic, SEO and audience editors should optimize it for retention. That means checking if the page is easy to use, has a great user experience, shows off your publication’s unique value proposition and provides reasons to stick around or invest (i.e., by a newsletter sign up box or clicking to subscribe).
Understanding branded search
Branded keyword traffic can reflect how well known your publication is, as well as the loyalty of your audience. It can also indicate any areas that need immediate attention.
A sudden spike in search for “your publication + login” may indicate issues with a paywall or site access;
Interest in “your publication + a product/vertical” (for example “nyt + well”) might indicate that content is hard to find on your homepage, and readers are using Google to bypass that problem.
Branded content with yearly ebbs and flows, such as "the athletic the beast" or "globe most liveable cities" (both of which are recurring projects), can reflect seasonal trends and interests.
A slow decline in branded searches may signal declining brand visibility or shifting audience preferences;
A gradual increase in branded searches is an indication your overall audience strategy — including off-platform efforts — is working.
By tracking this trendline, you can refine your content strategy and enhance the user experience for both loyal and new readers.
THE HOW TO
How to find your branded terms
Several tools, including Google Search Console, Google Trends and others, can be useful for uncovering branded keywords and their historic interest.
In Google Search Console, under the Performance tab for “Search results,” use the “Queries” section to analyze top terms sending traffic to your site. You should see your brand name (or a variation of) near the top of the list. (Caveat: Interest in search terms related to major news events often push branded search down.)
Using the Query filter, search for all terms containing your outlet's name to see the volume of branded traffic and the trendline over your preferred length of time.
If your site has a “the” at the beginning, do the search twice, or use the regular expression (regex) \b(?:the\s+)?publication\b to look for both variations.
Look at the data over the last six, 12 or 16 months, and ask:
Are clicks and impressions for queries containing your publication name increasing or decreasing? Consider this a gauge of general brand affinity.
What pages garner the most clicks and impressions? This list should include your most editorially important pages (i.e., the homepage, key section pages, login page, etc.).
What tag, topic or author pages are experiencing strong visibility for your brand? This can uncover where you have authority, or coverage areas search audiences are most interested in.
GSC data is a great place to start, and provides a useful snapshot of your site’s current branded search performance.
Analyze your site in an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, looking at the keywords that send your traffic. In Semrush, for example, the Domain Overview report provides an overview of the top branded terms.
Advanced filtering in Semrush lets you sort by branded and non-branded keywords. Use the "branded" filter to analyze the terms for which your publication ranks well.
This Semrush report includes the keywords, intent, SERP position and traffic generated from the term, among other metrics. This highlights the biggest queries readers are using to find your content.
Google Trends and Google alerts can also be useful. Set up an alert for your outlet’s name to track mentions across the web. Looking at your publication in Google Trends with the Glimpse extension can also show the search volume trendline for your publication, and whether it's growing, shrinking or holding steady.
This is a useful first step for analyzing how your traffic is changing. If Google Trends shows overall interest in your outlet declining, review technically site health, brand awareness and coverage areas.
The bottom line: Branded search refers to queries directly associated with your publication. Analyzing your branded search profile reveals the topics, coverage areas, authors and key products that readers most value and associate with your publication. Tracking branded search trends helps gauge your publication’s overall visibility.
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RECOMMENDED READING
Google news and updates
🤖 Barry Schwartz: John Mueller explains why Google doesn’t need to do anything special for pagination.
🤖 Barry Schwartz: Google’s persistent shortcut to faster crawling.
🤖 Barry Schwartz: Google lens: AI Overviews for iOS app.
Even more recommended reading
📊 Liz Voronina: SEO CTR analysis: Insights from Eli Schwartz and Buddler’s powerful reports.
📉 Despina Gavoyannis: How to analyze sudden traffic drops.
🔗 Shaun Anderson: Google Helpful Content Update SEO: The disconnected entity hypothesis.
🧑💻 Shaikat Ray: Improving crawling and indexing with noindex, robots.txt, and rel attributes.
🚫 Glenn Gabe: How to properly block content that’s violating Google’s site reputation abuse policy.
📬 Andy Vandervell: Non-obvious SEO advice for startups.
🔄 Laurence O'Toole: SERP, organic and AI Overviews: volatility research.
🛜 Kevin Indig: Impact of AI overviews on SEO.
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Have something you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on Twitter (Jessie or Shelby) or to our email: seoforjournalism@gmail.com.
Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley
Great article as ever. I used to work for a brand with a 4 letter abbreviation name - the list of regex misspellings went on forever! Handy to keep track of them in a Google Sheet.
Branded search is like a loyalty meter for publishers if people are Googling your name instead of just a topic, you’ve already won half the SEO battle. Love how this breaks down the difference between branded vs. non-branded queries. Also, that NYT 'Wordle' example is a gem just shows how a single product can redefine a brand's search footprint. Makes me wonder, how much of branded search growth is organic vs. driven by off-platform efforts like social and newsletters?