To accurately measure SEO results, you should have the non-brand organic traffic segmented. In this article, let's see why.
Why do we segment brand and non-brand traffic?
Not all organic traffic is SEO traffic.
Users often type your brand name in Google just because they find it easier than inputting your exact URL or because they want to navigate straight to the landing page they are interested in; but that is just another form of direct traffic. On your brand keywords, your website ranks first and usually with expanded results. So brand organic traffic has little to do with SEO, but mostly with brand awareness and loyalty.
Look at the following example:
To measure SEO traffic accurately, you need to filter out the brand traffic to focus on the non-brand traffic:
How does it work?
We use the (not provided) solution to distribute the organic traffic back into keywords. Then, we split the keywords between brand and non-brand.
SEOmonitor has different ways to identify and label branded keywords:
The brand rule is automatically defined when you enter all possible names and domains of the website you want to track, during the initial campaign setup. You add your brand name variations and we mark all the keywords extracted from Search Console that include one of them as branded. You can later adjust this rule in the Organic Traffic Configuration menu.
You can calibrate the brand/non-brand segmentation.
Identify individual non-brand keywords and label them manually as branded in the Organic Traffic Configuration menu.
Use case
Let's say that you want to prove to a client how many additional sessions and conversions they had since you started the contract. To accurately track and measure SEO performance, you need to isolate the non-brand traffic as that is the only traffic influenced by your SEO efforts.
1) Select a timeframe that includes the contract's start date to show the impact of your SEO efforts.
2) Switch between "All," "Brand," and "Non-Brand" tabs.
So, for example, if the entire organic traffic is growing, and your brand traffic is stable with your non-brand traffic is growing, you're getting results from your SEO efforts. On the contrary, if brand traffic had increased more than non-brand traffic, other marketing efforts could explain the growth in sessions.