Eli Schwartz’s Post

Organic brand traffic is too often taken for granted. I think that is in large part due to the struggle to pull insights forward that demonsrate how SEO is responsible for driving traffic when sometimes it should be “a given” to rank for brand terms. One way to look at this and to highlight the importance of branded SEO is to evaluate how users are speaking about said brand and call out whether you are putting the right content in front of them for their searches. This puts you in a position to demonstrate how you are expediting conversions, high value actions, etc.

In theory we can take some credit, but it's usually very difficult to make a strong case. For a big company especially, there's so much other noise happening at any given time: Product releases, quarterly investor reports, paid brand campaigns. Plus, the growth in customer-sourced traffic (e.g. login traffic) as your business grows. It's hard to separate all that from the SEO team's direct efforts. Also, if you're going to take credit for a branded growth, you have to be prepared to take responsibility when it drops. And that might not be fair at all. It might just be your business is losing demand despite your stellar SEO efforts.

I swear I saw you post the opposite opinion just last week. The only reason a team would take a lot of credit for brand search? They don’t have any wins on real SEO.

This is where SEO teams potentially need to be better at storytelling. I've seen SEO-focused efforts forced to report only on non-branded performance, however, paid teams showcase performance metrics that are driven by branded campaigns.

It’s a true marketing credit though. Yet, if the brand struggles to show up in search (generic name, aka Monday) it can become an SEO credit to get rankings and clicks. Though, if a brand declines with clicks even though it’s not about seasonality or loss in rankings- it’s circles back to the marketing efforts. We can’t control branded traffic as much as generic.

Brand searches are an important component of accurate organic traffic reporting (especially when you consider factors like seasonality, economy, campaigns in other channels) so I agree that it shouldn’t be excluded entirely from reporting, but the idea of SEO teams “taking credit” doesn’t sit well with me. You would never want an SEO team blamed for branded searches being down, so they should be reluctant to take credit when branded searches are up.

Increasing organic brand visibility and brand CTR/clicks is absolutely an accomplishment for the SEO. Look at how many sites don't rank number 1 for brand + reviews, brand vs competitor, brand + coupons, etc. Those are all branded queries, but most people just go with the "I already rank for my brand" because they think of their brand in the truly limited sense of the exact name and nothing more.

IMO the vast majority of PPC teams are unsophisticated and intentionally use branded targeting to pad their own weak numbers. Out of fairness most good marketing teams try to segment branded traffic out of reporting, unfortunately the vast majority of the PPC industry is not that sophisticated. On one level maybe it's fair because PPC has an implicit level of interruption so the brands perception could be a +/- multiplier on the creative and targeting quality, whereas SEO ideally bring in net new prospects or reengages prospects through demand fulfillment.

We support brand visibility but we don't generate most of that demand hence we only attribute non-brand to SEO investment. Works completely fine and we can continue to invest in SEO.

It's good advice, but might not be relevant as metrics for SEOs outside of off-site campaigns. Paired with EEAT perhaps, but it also depends a lot on where in your brand journey you are. I'd definitely focus a bit more on showcasing branded terms in my reports during the awareness stage for instance, where branded terms and impressions feel like winning even without the conversions.