What are branded keywords?
What are branded keywords?
Don’t sleep on branded keywords. They help us understand how our organizations are perceived and can uncover areas of potential opportunity.
Hello, and welcome back. Shelby here with your weekly dose of search knowledge. The first snowfall finally happened here in Toronto following an above-average balmy day, so I’m not really sure what season we’re about to embark on. Stay tuned.
This week, we’ll discuss branded keywords, which are the secret sauce to understanding what topics and areas of coverage readers associate with your publication.
While we have you… We’re planning for our end-of-the-year predictions about what will happen in the news SEO sphere in 2023! But we want you to contribute. Have a theory about technical SEO? Are you expecting AMP to finally go away? Share your predictions here.
Let’s get it.
In this issue:
What are branded keywords?
Why do branded keywords matter?
How do I leverage my publication’s branded keywords?
THE 101
What are branded keywords?
Branded keywords are phrases associated with the brand that people use to talk about your organization or look up information on it. These can be directly on search – which is what we’ll talk about mostly here – but also on social media, where people will talk about your organization.
Branded queries are usually navigational queries – people who search them are usually trying to get to a specific website or page. The click-through rate for branded queries also tends to be higher (50 per cent or more of people who search for brands click on the top ranking page).
Think about it: A reader searches “the athletic” and clicks on the first link, which sends them to The Athletic’s homepage. Or, a reader saw something on Twitter and went to search for more information. Perhaps the reader doesn’t know your full URL. Maybe they’re just lazy. Sometimes, you just type where you want to go, and Google does the rest.
Branded keywords can show up in a few different ways:
Brand names: “subscribe new york times,” “the athletic,” “the independent crossword”;
Product or service names: “Frappuccino” is a branded keyword for Starbucks; “Wordle” is now a branded keyword for The New York Times;
Misspellings: Brands or products that may be commonly misspelled;
People: Reporters who are very well known or people who are closely associated with the publication (e.g.: “Nate Silver” for FiveThirtyEight).
Why do branded keywords matter?
There are a few reasons branded keywords matter for your SEO strategy:
Learn what topics and areas of expertise audiences associate with your brand;
Find reputation concerns;
See where competitors vary;
Discover opportunities for optimization.
Branded keywords, in the context of search, provide insight into how your current audience ends up on your site. This can help you understand what products, content verticals, writers and services help your organization stand out.
Branded keywords can identify untapped opportunities you didn’t even know existed.
If you see a lot of people search “your brand + topic,” this can indicate that readers come to your publication for information on this specific topic regularly.
From here, you can dive deeper into the associated keywords. For example, if your brand is regularly mentioned with “cooking recipes,” then you can look at other keywords associated with cooking, recipes and cooking ideas.
You can also dive deeper into the URLs people click when they search this branded keyword and get insight into the types of content people look for.
Now, you can pitch a subtopic as a new vertical or an area for expanded coverage. Because the newsroom already covers it, you know the topic aligns with editorial goals and is effective at driving traffic to your most important journalism.
Doubling down on content areas that you already cover can create new audience growth opportunities and potentially increase traffic.
Why is it important I track my branded keywords?
Usually, branded keywords provide consistent or slowly increasing traffic. The reason is mostly habitual – people perform the same action to get the same result. Those are loyal readers who continue to come back. Every week you should see roughly the same number of people – if not more – searching your branded keywords.
Your branded keywords traffic should stay consistent even as other keyword traffic fluctuates. Tracking branded keywords can be a useful proxy for traffic fluctuations and you can more quickly spot a decline and take action.
For example, you were getting consistent – but not very high – traffic to your site’s login or account sign in page. Suddenly, one week, traffic from keywords including “your brand + login” skyrockets. This could indicate a problem with your readers accessing or loading the page or another issue that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.
By tracking your branded keywords, you can build out a strategy to enhance the experience you already provide your audience and make it better for new top-of-the-funnel readers.
Read more 🔗: Branded versus non-branded search: What’s the difference?
THE HOW TO
How do I find my publication’s branded keywords?
You can find your branded keywords in a few different places depending on your goal. I recommend starting with Google Search Console as it will show you what branded keywords drive the most traffic (and to which pages). Meanwhile, using an SEO tool can help narrow in on the more intricate details.
Google Search Console: Go into your performance tab and add a filter by query. Write in your publication’s name. You’ll see the list of all the branded keywords people use to navigate to your site.
Pro tip: if there’s a “the” at the beginning of your publication’s name, run this twice (with and without the “the”). It’ll show you what the readers’ are searching for in all phrases.
Ahrefs/SEMRush/most SEO tools: Run your domain through one of these tools and it will likely give you a list of all keywords. From there, filter by branded and non-branded keywords.
SEMRush provides a trend report as well as the percentage of branded versus non-branded traffic on your site, with an option to filter exclusively by branded or non-branded keywords.
Social: There are a ton of social listening tools (Sparktoro, Sprout Social, Crowdtangle are just a few) that can help you set up dashboards to monitor how the audience talks about your publication on social media. Searching directly on the platform for your publication’s name can work, too, but be ready for some noise.
Google Alerts: Every publication I’ve worked with I’ve set a Google alert for their name to go to my email. That way if someone mentions the publication, I can check out what’s being said and – if necessary – ask for a backlink or alert my editors.
How do I leverage my publication’s branded keywords?
Like everything, the way you leverage your publication’s branded keywords will depend on your goals. But branded keywords provide you an opportunity to see the topics, areas of expertise, reporters and habits readers associate with your publication. Think about branded keywords as your brand reputation.
You can always expand the coverage, topics or products mentioned in your branded keywords to make sure you provide the best experience for your readers. Ahrefs has a great guide on how to optimize for branded search, including a step-by-step process to find branded keywords where you rank poorly, or not at all.
Alternatively, you can use this approach to see your competitors’ branded keywords. This analysis can tell you what readers think of your competitors and where you can lean in to gain an advantage over them.
Use your branded keywords as an opportunity to double down on what you already do well. Use them as a jumping off point to really nail your expertise and authority (E.A.T!) strategy.
The bottom line: Branded keywords are phrases that are associated with your publication. These keywords give us an understanding of how our organizations are perceived and insight into areas of potential opportunity. Don’t sleep on your branded keywords.
THE JOBS LIST
These are audience positions across the globe in journalism. Want to include a role for promotion? Email us.
Indiegraf is hiring an Audience Strategist in the United States (remote).
theScore is hiring a Social Media Editor, Sports Betting in Toronto.
The Washington Post is hiring an SEO editor for the west coast (remote), a Newsletter Editor and Audience and Subscriber Engagement Editor.
The New York Times is hiring a variety of roles, including Newsletter Editor and Assistant Content Strategist for NYT Cooking; Assistant Community Engagement Manager for Games and Senior Staff Editor for Newsletters.
The Globe and Mail is hiring a Content Editor for Audience Growth.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Gray Dot Company: Brand Positioning & SEO: Aligning User Intent, Data with Brand Strategy
Onely: Google needs 9x more time to crawl Javascript than HTML
Moz: The Authoritative Content Funnel - Whiteboard Friday
Aleyda Solis: A presentation on building a modern day e-commerce SEO strategy
Wix: Why cultural relevance is the key to international SEO success
Brodie Clark 🧵: The four different types of sitelinks on Google
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