SEOmonitor automatically moves keywords related to the monitored website's brand into a separate group, isolated from the “All keywords” group. It is not taken into account in any metric or feature regarding the SEO campaign.
We do this to avoid distorting campaign- or group-level metrics, since branded/navigational keywords:
usually have high search volumes,
the tracked website usually ranks #1,
while the competitors most likely won’t rank on them.
This distorts the Competition Visibility against the tracked website, erroneously showing the tracked website as having higher Visibility than anybody else.
Mixing them would mean that the overall portfolio visibility would be artificially increased, with a high baseline, allowing for only a few "degrees" of movement when the non-branded keywords' rankings improve or drop. This may “hide” important SEO performance changes.
How do we detect brand keywords?
When adding new keywords, they are being enriched with many automatic labels mostly based on their SERPs. They are also added to respective smart groups based on the criteria of the smart groups.
The branded/navigational keywords are detected when:
the website ranking #1 shows expanded full site-links,
the same website is ranking on the first 3 positions,
the same website ranking with small site links but also ranking in the Knowledge Graph feature
there is no featured snippet in the SERP for the keyword
If the website on the first position is the tracked website, the keyword is automatically moved to the Brand smart group. If the first position is not the tracked website (so any other website except facebook, wikipedia or gov.uk), the keyword will be labeled and highlighted as Brand of others.
The separate Brand group ensures that all keywords recognized as “your website’s brand” by Google are excluded from your campaign's Visibility (not a part of All Keywords). The keywords in the Brand group cannot be moved to other groups, and you cannot manually add keywords to the Brand group. The “Brand” group is completely isolated, and useful when explored alone (separate from other keywords). They are not included in the Forecast, nor in the SEO Opportunity metric.
Note: The keywords in the Brand folder don't contribute to any metrics and are kept separate from All Keywords. But you might still want to track some of your branded keywords, not for SEO purposes, but rather for tracking search demand and ranking of the (owned) media.