SEO also informs brand analysis, and smart businesses monitor brand loyalty through keyword searches
Do you work in brand management? Are you part of a business that often emphasizes to its employees how important its brand identity is? Do you ever sit in meetings where executives and others speak about brand campaigns and yet don’t really present reports that drive home to the entire organization what the quantifiable results of such campaigns actually are—hard numbers about not just brand traffic but data that substantiate brand awareness over years?
Many of us can answer “yes” to these questions. Corporate branding is very important while being very, well, amorphous, when it comes to discrete data about performance. As an SEO professional, I am also a brand marketer. As a result, I have tracked brand performance through keyword data (for short-, mid-, and long-term scenarios) and directly addressed the important brand-analysis predicaments in the sections below.
Brand identity is paramount for A.I. search optimization
Branding is important for so many reasons. These days, it is crucial to remember how closely brand awareness and loyalty are to generative engine optimization (GEO). Getting mentions in A.I. search results means getting noticed as a well-regarded, authoritative brand by large language models.
That means the following sections about brand performance are especially salient to businesses that are eager to track brand and answer-engine performance.
Can brand awareness and loyalty be reliably quantified?
Yes, definitely. There is no better way to measure how well your brand is performing than by tracking both specific and broad searches relating to your brand. With keyword search volume data, actual searches are logged over time. Those are quantified data points. That’s because real, live human beings who know about your brand sit down at computers and pull up Google on their smartphones and type in the name of your brand. They speak your brand name into voice searches.
All of these data points are captured and aggregated. They are the most surefire, consistent measure of how active your brand is in the minds of folks in the real world. Read on for more specifics on quantifiability.
How are brand searches measures of how a brand is faring with the public?
There are several helpful ways in which you can view search data about your brand and/or products. Underlying each method are the simple notions of whether the terms in question are stable, declining, or increasing. For example, a brand name that is averaging a consistent number of searches every month over years is, very logically, in a stable (if static) place.
The following points illustrate the main aspects of tracking your brand’s search data:
How does your brand today compare to your brand last year?
This is key. How many human beings are there today who actively search for your brand? That is a firm number. It is tracked by Google. And Google knows whether the folks out there today are searching for your brand in higher, lower, or similar numbers. Shouldn’t you know this too (if you don’t already)?
Imagine that you are a top e-commerce brand selling lamps. Your brand name is “Lamps R Us,” and you have been retailing direct to online customers for 15 years. If you have been tracking the number of broad and exact searches for your brand since then, you are a true visionary. But even if you’ve only been tracking such searches for the last couple years, the data insights you’re gaining are priceless.
These are actual data for a real past client. I’ve anonymized the search terms to fit our Lamps R Us example. That being said, I hope it’s clear how brand interest has dropped for this e-commerce business. Here are a couple of terms to bear in mind:
- Exact Match keywords: These are the data that correspond directly to the words you typed into your keyword tool. If you searched for “Lamps R Us,” then the exact-match data point indicates that the aggregated number of searches applies to that one phrase.
- Broad Match keywords: This is the number of aggregated searches that generally fit the phrase you searched for. For example, it could include additional terms like “lamps r us online,” “lamps r us discounts,” “lamps r us new styles,” as well as potential misfits like “lamp rust.”
Knowledge is power, truly. Being on top of data like these puts you in charge of how to respond to tough challenges as well as branding boons.
Why track both brand name and broad searches?
There are many reasons why you’d want to track general keyword searches. But why you want to track such “broad” searches in tandem with brand searches is because you’ll gain awareness of whether your brand is growing as your associated industry is growing, and by which rates. Of course, you would also be able to see if your brand is shrinking while product interest generally is growing—so on and so forth.
Thinking of it simply, if your website’s products are all lamps, you can track search results for lamps overall as well as key lamp types (floor lamps, desk lamps, table lamps, etc). If quantitative data about lamp searches document, say, +15% growth year-on-year (YoY) but searches in your brand name, “Lamps R Us,” is -18% YoY, you have some hard data that indicate how your brand has shrunk while interest in your product category has actually increased.
You want to know this—and all possible versions of this example as they play out in reality—in order to be able to respond strategically to correct for your brand awareness and loyalty in order to leverage the increased interest in lamps out there online.
What is the ratio of brand and general terms over time?
Building on the example in the prior section, when you are data-aware, you are simply smarter. When you track “lamps r us” and “desk lamp” searches every month for years, you have a quantified understanding of your market. As a brand marketer, you are empowered with these data points because you have knowledge that directly indicate user interest last month versus the month or year before that.
As you track the data points specifically, you are also empowered by knowing the ratio of your brand searches to general searches. For example, if you track keyword data for two years and show a fairly stable 50%-50% share of brand-to-general search terms that drive traffic to your website, you can raise a yellow flag of concern if you start to notice brand searches slipping to 40% of overall traffic. If the ratio changed to 40%-60% because there was a significant increase in user interest in lamps generally by Google searchers (and your website captured more of those non-branded lamp searches), then you’ll know why your search ratio shifted.
How are competitors’ brand searches versus yours?
One additional crucial aspect of tracking brand searches for your business is that you can also track searches for competing brand names. This enables you to be on the lookout for whether a new or longtime competitor is really capitalizing on its growing brand awareness and converting lamp shoppers to its loyal users—shoppers who make repeat purchases and act as brand promoters to friends, for example.
The real-life data shown above have been anonymized for our lamps example. But you can still see how ABZ Internet Lamps has far more branded and non-branded keywords attributed to it than Lamps R Us does, and can see how ABZ keeps growing its branded searches. That is a surefire sign of strong brand growth, while Lamps R Us has actually lost a significant number of brand searches—at least in the recent couple of months. It’s very good to know this so the business can monitor and address this, especially if it continues and doesn’t turn out to be a temporary drop.
In another example, you could be super satisfied to track your 50%-50% ratio (from the preceding section) of brand-to-general searches over time—especially if you also show search volume growing over time too. However, if one of the most pesky competitors of Lamps R Us happens to be ABZ Internet Lamps, and you see searches for “abz internet lamps” and “abz lamps” shift from getting 30% of traffic to their website to 70% of traffic over a few months, you know you’re seeing a substantial increase in their brand awareness that would be very important to discuss with your Chief Marketing Officer.
How does tracking brand keywords compare to tracking brand campaigns?
If you are a brand marketer, you likely have campaign tracking set up that enables you to log, aggregate, and compare your scheduled brand campaigns. Tracking your brand’s keyword searches is different. Organic keywords are baselines. They aren’t tied to marketing campaigns—not directly, at least. While it’s possible, even likely, that some users might see a splashy influencer campaign tied to your brand in social media, for example, and will then think to search for “lamps r us” a day or two later, organic keyword searches are much more likely to provide a long-term, grounded sense of your brand’s core users’ use of your brand name in search engines rather than the direct responses of users within your dedicated brand campaigns.
Is monitoring keyword searches sufficient for all brand reporting?
Nope. I highly recommend tracking organic keywords, as they relate to and include your brand name, as one of your standard brand reports. These data are best when paired with your regular reporting as it relates to tracking brand performance. I would think of the search terms as foundational data, given their strength of being founded in actual logged user behavior, with other data considered to be building out more robust reporting.
What is the most reliable data source for keyword searches?
Nothing beats Semrush. I don’t represent this keyword-data powerhouse application, but I’m just one of its many fans as a longtime SEO expert. You can get keyword search volume numbers and associated metrics from other sources—including within Google Ads Keyword Planner—but subscribing to Semrush is what I recommend. In fact, your business may already have a subscription, especially if you have dedicated SEO staff.
Pro Tip: Whatever source of keyword metrics that you select, be sure that you’ll have access to historical keyword data. You’ll definitely want to build reports that reference keyword searches from past years, not just the present month going forward.
Get help with your brand and your SEO
Organic search is complex. Whether you’re monitoring and improving your brand awareness, targeting keyword gaps for high-value phrases, strategically growing your long-tail reach in Search, or more, having a seasoned, knowledgeable SEO and GEO expert on your side is more important than ever. After all, as noted above, growing brand awareness is a core aspect of generative engine optimization and helps your brand to get mentions (and clicks) in A.I. search results. So please click that button below and let’s discuss your brand’s future successes in all aspects of organic search.