What is Branded Traffic and Why is it Important for Businesses?

Traffic to any website can be divided into two main groups: branded searches and all other searches, i.e., clicks on a wide variety of keywords, both informative and commercial.

Branded traffic is any search query that includes the name of a particular company in the keyword phrase (e.g., “query + company name”).

This type of traffic is valuable for businesses as an excellent indicator of brand awareness, high search rankings, and excellent click-through-rate (CTR).

How to see branded traffic to your site

Finding out the percentage of traffic that is branded for your website is relatively easy; all you need to do is add it to the Google Search Console panel. In the Keyword Visibility report, simply head to the Queries tab and enter the company’s name (or variations thereof) as a filter:

Below, we’ve included a few screenshots where you can clearly see how confident the site feels with good visibility for branded search queries (in this case, we are talking about a personal brand):

As you can see in the images above, the CTR is simply excellent. This is not surprising, as people are specifically looking for information related to a specific company, not just any information.

Interestingly, for almost every advertised business, such transitions make up a significant proportion of the total traffic:

What is branded traffic worth to a business?

With competition increasing in every field, traffic from branded queries can be seen as a kind of “golden share.” It is a guarantee of stable conversions, regardless of how the competitive environment might change.

The benefits of having branded traffic to your site are numerous and tangible:

1. Good search ranking. The target company’s website almost always ranks first or in the top 3 results for branded searches. Combined with the display of ads in the context of branded keywords, a Google Business Profile card, and being listed with aggregators, you can confidently monopolize the entire first page of search results.
2. High conversion rate. With branded traffic, users are looking for a specific brand with which they are already more or less familiar. This can have a positive impact on conversion rates, leading to further progression through the sales funnel. Such people are already inclined to make a positive decision and are more likely to order a service or make a purchase.
3. Improved behavioral metrics. Branded queries bring in an already invested audience, which improves behavioral metrics such as time on site, depth of view, and bounce rate. These are all positive signals to search engines, which begin to rank the website higher not only for your branded keywords but for other keywords as well.
4. An edge over the competition. When someone searches for a branded query, your site is perceived by Google as a “welcome” site, i.e., the most relevant site. Sometimes, such sites are even ranked higher in the search results.
5. Protection from algorithm changes. No matter how Google’s ranking formula changes, your site will always be at the top for brand queries. This is very important in today’s world where algorithms are constantly changing.

Therefore, branded search traffic is important for any business that wants to develop in the long run. This offers an opportunity to build a community of loyal customers around your business and gain repeat sales (without additional investment in marketing).

How to increase brand traffic to improve awareness of your company

In order to get conversions from organic searches for these types of branded keywords, you need to stimulate their growth in some way. SEO contributes to this, but to “pump up” the company’s brand as a whole, it’s advisable to use the widest possible range of methods, each of which contributes to this.

1. Content marketing. Writing high-quality publications based on the website’s niche should be combined with posting materials on other sites about your relevant topics. Each article that is posted on another site can also attract more traffic, some of which will flow back to your site. Then, you can engage in additional promotion for both types of publications.

2. Local SEO. Local SEO is one of the best ways to drive branded traffic to a website for small businesses with local followings, in particular. Many factors can positively impact local searches, and these are often common practices. For example, website design should be mobile friendly, page loading speed should be fast, etc. Selected snippets, micro-markup integration, and presence on Google Maps all work well for CTR without needing additional investment.

3. YouTube channel. The YouTube platform is full of “wild” traffic, and in some niches, competition is still at a minimum. To be more precise, sometimes, there are no competitors at all, which is usually because the platform is difficult to work with and requires more investment in technical equipment, time to work on scripts, video editing, etc. However, the returns can be excellent.

4. Work with aggregators. In many niches, aggregators have confidently monopolized the top positions, but you can use this to your advantage. By creating and promoting company profiles on these resources, you can gain additional search exposure with minimal effort, thus increasing your brand’s reach.

5. Integrated Digital Marketing. When we talk about brand presence on different platforms and omnichannel content delivery, we tend to look beyond classic SEO and start dealing with many different forms of online promotion, including:

• Display advertising;
• Social media marketing;
• Google Ads contextual advertising;
• Email marketing;
• Messenger marketing, etc.

In combination with SEO, these solutions effectively solve the problem of increasing brand awareness and target audience loyalty.

Strive to be the last click

If you can make your website as good as other established and reputable brands, the search engine will appreciate it. This is because Google’s algorithms are increasingly focused on evaluating websites comprehensively.

In this paradigm, the share of branded queries becomes one of the core indicators of a resource’s quality. A high number of branded queries means that the site is useful, informative, convenient, authoritative, reliable, beautiful, etc. Remember: any attribute can be applied to both a good site and a good brand.

If users find what they’re looking for after visiting your site, you may become the first site they choose in the search results the next time they visit.

People searching directly for your brand are often either existing or potential customers. Therefore, this traffic is extremely valuable to any business.

Promoting a brand online can take a long time and often requires a lot of investment of time and money. However, as you have hopefully realized after reading this article, it is well worth it.

Want to increase brand awareness, website traffic or sales performance? Contact Me. I can help you build a tailored, efficient SEM strategy to maximize your business goals!