In short
- Branded searches include your name. Non-branded searches describe what you do.
- Report the two apart, or brand demand can hide a drop in new organic traffic.
- Write down your brand terms once, including misspellings and product names, and use the same list everywhere.
- Pull the data from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools into one dashboard, and tie leads back to it in the CRM.
What counts as brand and non-brand
A branded query includes your company name, a product name or your domain. Someone typing it already knows who you are.
A non-branded query describes a need, a service or a problem, with no name in it. Someone typing it may not know you exist yet.
- Branded: your company name, misspellings of it, product or program names, your domain.
- Non-branded: the service, the location, the question or the problem.
- Mixed: a service plus your name. Count these as branded, because the person already knows you.
Why one SEO number is not enough
Brand search reflects demand you already have: word of mouth, ads, referrals, past patients or customers. Non-brand search is where SEO brings in people who did not know you.
When they share one line on a chart, a good month for brand can cover a bad month for non-brand. The total looks flat or up, while new organic demand is falling.
Split them, and each team gets an honest number. Marketing and leadership can see brand demand. The SEO team can see whether non-brand clicks are growing.
1. Write down your brand terms
The split is only as good as the list behind it. Write it once and use the same list in every report.
- Your company name, with and without spaces, and its misspellings.
- Program, product and location names that only you use.
- Your domain name.
- Names of people that searchers use to find you, if they are public on your site.
Look at your top queries in Search Console and add anything that is clearly you. Review the list when you launch a new name or program.
2. Pull the query data from both search engines
Organic query data comes from the search engines, not from your analytics tool. GA4 does not show the search terms behind organic visits.
- Google Search Console: queries, pages, clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: its own search performance report, with keywords and pages for Bing.
- Verify both for your site first. We set up and verify both as part of SEO tracking work.
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3. Split the queries in one place
Do the split once, in the dashboard or the data layer, so every chart uses the same rule.
Match the brand list
A query that contains any brand term is branded. In Search Console, a regex filter on the query does this.
Label everything else non-brand
Anything left is non-branded, apart from the queries Search Console does not show.
Keep it automatic
Pull the data on a schedule into a tool like Looker Studio or Google Sheets, so nobody rebuilds the split by hand each month.
4. What to put on the dashboard
- Clicks and impressions for brand and non-brand, side by side, month over month.
- Click-through rate and average position per segment.
- Top non-brand queries and the pages they land on.
- Google and Bing apart, then combined.
- Leads and revenue by segment, where the CRM can tie them back (see below).
5. Tie it to leads in the CRM
Search Console counts clicks, not leads. To see which segment brings in business, the CRM needs to know that a lead came from organic search and which page it landed on.
With the landing page on the lead, you can group leads by the pages that rank for brand terms and the pages that rank for non-brand terms. It is not a perfect match, because one page can rank for both, but it shows the trend.
Where to start
Start with the brand list and Search Console. That alone answers the main question: is non-brand search growing?
If you want to see how your search data, analytics and CRM connect today, map it with our free tech stack diagram builder, or book a free call and we will walk through it with you.
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