While you may want to exclude branded searches to analyze the true impact of your efforts on organic traffic, another key measure of the success and progression of your strategy is the change in the percentage breakdown of non-branded traffic your site is receiving.
Branded traffic usually comes from prior knowledge of a company or a recommendation from someone. Maybe a user saw your social ads or your latest PR campaign, or maybe they met you at an hong kong phone number list event. What’s important to note here is how much the user was already aware of your brand.
While this clearly means that a marketing channel is performing well, it is usually not traffic that you can directly attribute to your SEO efforts.
Non-branded traffic, on the other hand, is usually made up of people searching for keywords related to your products or services, for which you rank well on Google. In other words, it is traffic coming from users who probably were not familiar with your business before seeing you positioned in the SERPs.
It will therefore be very useful for you to measure the split of branded vs non-branded traffic, something you can easily do with SEMrush's Organic Research tool :
While tracking keyword positioning may seem less important than some of the other metrics mentioned above, it can be useful and we highly recommend monitoring the positioning of your main keywords in the SERPs.
If we look back even just five years, positioning was the primary metric of success for an SEO campaign.
So what has changed? Semantic Search .
In the past, most companies tracked a handful of keywords and based their strategy’s success on that; today, the content on a single page can rank for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of different keywords. And that’s not to mention personalized search — different users can see different results for certain queries.
Let's look at an example of different keywords. The Organic Research tool lets you see the keywords a page ranks for. For example, this article ranks for 522 keywords. Look at the variations:
Keyword Tracking
Tracking keyword rankings isn’t the metric it once was, but it’s still incredibly useful for showing the progress of a strategy. After all, if your main keywords are rising in rankings, it means your strategy is starting to pay off.
You can use SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool to track your main keyword rankings in the SERPs.
Branded vs Non-Branded Traffic
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