Branded keywords are terms that are directly associated with your brand, products, and services. These types of branded keywords can be found through both social media and search engines.
Branded keywords refer to brand-related keywords. Before we can discuss how branded and non-branded keywords fit into your strategy, it's important that you have a clear understanding of both. A clear explanation of branded keywords is therefore essential.
Brand keywords contain your company name. To take our own agency as an example, any keyword that includes "SEO» contains a trademarked keyword, independent of the other words surrounding it.
These brand keywords are very important to increase the visibility and findability of your company in search engines.
Brand name keywords that include other brands are not considered trademarked keywords for your business. This distinction is important if you are a retailer and carry products from other brands.
In this case, you should focus on non-branded keywords to place your products in search engines.
The popular shoe retailer Zappos, for example, sells shoes from hundreds of different brands. In this case, keywords like "Zappos boots" and "Zappos reviews" are brand terms – "Nike sneakers" and "Birkenstock sandals," on the other hand, are not, even though Zappos carries these products.
A clear distinction between brand keywords and non-brand-related keywords is therefore essential.
Although these keywords point to specific brands, they are not unique to the company. Users searching for these keywords are not specifically looking to buy from Zappos or learn more about the brand – they are looking for a particular product that many other retailers carry. Therefore, you should not base your PPC strategy exclusively on these keywords.
Users who search for your brand keywords, on the other hand, show a clear interest in your company – and in most cases, they are already familiar with the products you offer.
A clear distinction and targeted integration of brand keywords and non-brand-related keywords can help you increase your company's visibility and attract potential customers.
It might seem counterintuitive to optimize for your brand-related keywords. If the searcher already knows your brand, isn't the work already done?
On the contrary, those who are already familiar with your brand are among the most important customers to win over. Since they have already completed the first phase of the customer journey, it is easy to engage them and help them progress further down the funnel.
Brand-related search queries typically have a navigational intent, so ranking for your "brand names" keywords can help your potential customers find you faster.
You might also be wondering: Shouldn't my website automatically rank highly since my brand is unique? Even if you rank for your brand name with a short search term, it's possible that other websites rank better than you for your brand-related long-tail keywords.
It is therefore also important to ensure that your text is relevant and meets the needs of your target audience, especially when it comes to brand-related search queries. The quality of the text on your website can have a significant impact on how well you rank for your brand keywords and how effectively you engage potential customers.
Identify your brand-related keywords. Before you begin optimizing for brand keywords, you must first identify all variations of the brand keywords for which you can rank.
To the Finding keywords, for which you are ranked, simply open the performance report in the Google Search Console Enter the words/phrases that describe your brand or products into the filters. Then export this list to a table, which you will need later.
If you do not have access to the website's Search Console, you can use a similar function in our free Ahrefs Webmasters Tools.
To find more brand keyword ideas, including ones you're not ranking for, you'll need a keyword tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. Enter the brand keywords from your spreadsheet and press Enter. Then, access the "Relevant Terms" report to get a list of all your brand keywords.
You now have a list of brand keywords to work with. Remember that you'll need to repeat this process for each country if you want to reach searchers in multiple countries.
There are several types of brand keywords worth targeting:
Identify all keywords that rank in first place and check if you can create content to optimize for them.
You might have keywords that rank number one, but not offer users what they're looking for. Adapt your content to ensure the page can rank number one for that keyword with the right intent.
The keywords with high search volume that you can target and increase traffic.
Anchoring your brand terms with internal links can help Google understand your website's structure and strengthen your brand keywords. Some important areas where internal links should be placed include:
You can also use Ahrefs' Site Audit tool and open the Link Opportunities report to find brand keywords to which you can add internal links.
It's a common question to ask whether trademarked or untrademarked keywords deliver better results. This is a particularly frequent question for marketers creating PPC campaigns, as each keyword comes with specific costs.
The truth is, however, that both branded and unbranded keywords are important for SEO and PPC campaigns. They reflect different search intents and reach users at different stages of the buying process.
To illustrate this, you can use Google's Keyword Planner to search for both branded and non-branded keywords as part of your campaigns. For this page, we'll look at the results of a search for the non-branded keyword "running shoes" and the branded keyword "Skora running shoes".
Using this example, we will discuss which of these keywords is the better choice in terms of visibility, competition, costs, and conversions.
If you want to reach new customers, you should target keywords that many people search for. Targeting high-volume keywords maximizes the number of people who see your ads (provided your bid is high enough to appear for those keywords).
If you consider the average monthly search queries for these two keywords, ads for "running shoes" could potentially reach 100.000 more users than "Skora running shoes".
Therefore, if your main priorities are to increase visibility in search engine results, raise brand awareness, and bring new visitors to your website, then non-branded keywords are the better choice to achieve these goals.
The level of competition in the Keyword Planner is determined by the number of advertisers bidding on a specific keyword. The higher the competition for a keyword, the more difficult it becomes to run your ad for that keyword.
Texting and business are closely linked when it comes to selecting the right keywords for your PPC strategy.
Non-branded keywords are inherently more competitive because they are not limited to a specific company. There could be thousands of other businesses trying to advertise similar products and services to yours, but ideally, your brand name should be unique.
However, your competitors can still bid on your brand keywords to capture the attention of users who are directly searching for your business. This usually only happens in extremely competitive industries, but it's something you should keep in mind when developing your PPC strategy.
Due to low competition, the cost per click (CPC) for brand keywords is usually also low. If only a handful of advertisers bid on a keyword, the cost of an ad for that keyword is often just a few cents.
So if staying within a specific budget is one of your main concerns at PPC Brand keywords are the best choice for ads with low CPC.
The ultimate goal of all your marketing campaigns is to generate sales and revenue for your business. This means you should target keywords with high conversion rates.
In the context of PPC, ads for branded keywords typically have higher conversion rates than ads for non-branded keywords. Therefore, if you create separate campaigns for branded and non-branded keywords, your results for the branded keywords will likely be better.
However, it is important to know that searchers who use brand-related search terms are usually further along in the buying process.
They have probably already researched their options and visited your website in previous searches, and are familiar with the products and services you offer.
Even though a branded ad may be the last point of contact before conversion, they may have first found your business through an unbranded search.
Of course, this doesn't diminish the results of brand-name campaigns – after all, they lead to conversions. But in most cases, these conversions are the end result of a strategy that includes both brand-related and brand-independent search terms.
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