Written by Fernando Maciá
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What is branded SEO?
We call branded SEO to the positioning in search engines of those terms and keywords that include the brand under which a company, a professional, a product or a service is known.
This is a key marketing strategy for businesses whose brands already have some recognition in their market, since users who make this type of query are already familiar with them and are clearly interested in the products or services marketed under that particular name.
Some examples of brand searches: “hotel NH Valencia”, “nestlé chocolate ice cream”, “dr martens military boots”, “alain afflelou prescription glasses”, “bic pens”… but also “books by Elvira Lindo” or “valencia milan iberia”.
Why it is important to bet on branded SEO
Higher conversion power
Brands often overlook this aspect of search engine optimization, and do not give it the importance it deserves, thinking that by including their own name, their work in this regard is already completed. The truth is that they ignore their full potential, since branded searches have a conversion potential at least twice as high as non-branded searches. Moreover, it is actually much easier to appear in the top positions for “alain afflelou prescription glasses” than for, for example, simply “prescription glasses”, since the level of competition is much higher.
When a user performs a brand search, it is usually because they are already at a very advanced point in the conversion funnel, so we could be losing potential customers already ready to be converted by not offering them an easier way to find us. This type of customer has already gone through the phase where they are evaluating options, weighing different products and their prices, and have decided (or almost decided) on our option, convinced that it will be the best for one reason or another. For that reason it is extremely important to optimize our website also with brand terms.
On the other hand, experts in the field such as Rand Fishkin have observed that if many people search for a particular product with a brand name, over time Google will start to associate it with that product and offer it as suggested search or a related search when someone enters that term in the search engine. This gives you the possibility for your brand to become the reference manufacturer in that particular field and people looking for it will recognize it as such.
For example, if we search for “bass amplifier“, Google suggests the following branded searches:
We find renowned brands such as Fender, Ampeg or Marshall, among others, specialists for decades in the manufacture of musical instruments.
Another example. We introduce“electric toothbrushes“, in this case we opted for a product with a somewhat more unequal competition:
And we see how the Oral-B brand stands out as a clear leader in the manufacture of this product, either due to good marketing, SEO, reputation, etc., or a combination of all these factors and many others.
These are searches where our competitors also position themselves
Although it seems a contradiction, the truth is that there are many cases in which there are competitors who also strive to position themselves for searches with our brand. Thus, large retail aggregators or hotel websites will do their best to capture as much organic and paid search engine traffic as possible by positioning themselves both naturally and by bidding for branded searches in AdWords.
We can see this example where for the search “panama jack offer” we find that many competitors snatch both organic and paid positions from the brand itself, thus cannibalizing a large part of a traffic with high conversion possibilities:
In short, it is absolutely necessary that our website has a balance between being optimized for both branded SEO and non-branded SEO, to cover both fronts and increase our chances of conversion, improve our reputation and ensure the success of the brand in search engines.
Additional references
- Why Your SEO Focus Should Be Brand Building – Brad Smith.
- Branded query optimization for SEO – Clay Cazier.
- Non-branded SEO.
