Branded vs Non-Branded Traffic: Which Matters Most?

Nowadays, the brand name speaks louder than non-branded. And people trust brands more. Once you establish your brand, people recognize your services, product, or personal brand with your brand name itself. 

Well, there are certain similarities and at another a different ball game with online traffic. People put their queries, search engines match them with relevant keywords and search intent. Accordingly, it displays suitable results on SERPs. 

What is branded vs non branded traffic?

Here comes the role of digital marketing. How do you pitch yourself on the internet? What are the digital marketing techniques you adopt? These are:

• Content marketing
• PPC advertising
• Social media marketing
• SEO
• Search engine marketing

Other than that, there is tons of non-branded traffic as well. Non-traffic is at the heart of marketing. It includes people looking for general information, comparing similar products, and others. 

And how does branded and non-branded traffic influence your revenue generation, optimizing both of them and further information? It matters the most how we use keywords! We’ll cover details about both types of traffic. 

Here, the target makes a complete difference. You may require optimization or ad campaigning to a vast extent. Stay tuned in the sections below.

What are Branded and Non-Branded Keywords?

Branded keywords are keywords specific to your brands and branded items. Indeed, it is necessary to tap both the resources to get maximum results.

Let’s say a brand, SuperWatch, sells wristwatches having analog and digital segments. 

So, its branded long tail and short tail keywords will be ‘SuperWatch stylish watches’, Girl watches by SuperWatch’, ‘Latest SuperWatch digital watches’, ‘SuperWatch white dial Men’s watch and so on. Its non-branded versions will be ‘latest men’s watches, ‘watches with grace’, ‘Top wrist watches’, and the like.

Do you that branded keywords account for 10% of the searches? It has less competition and a near 100% conversion rate. Also, it has a lower cost-per-click (CPC) ratio. But, why? And there are fewer companies that bid for branded keywords. 

And non-branded keywords constitute 80% of the total product searches and transactional 10%. In this segment, there is a complete rush available for bidding. But, yes! It improves your online visibility that generates more leads and gives a boost to your ROI.

Thus, non-branded keywords make up the substantial input of the marketing funnel, while branded ones drive your sales at the bottom of the funnel. Non-branded keywords increase your brand awareness in the land of generic keywords. So, you can plan out digital marketing to get maximum revenue and sales.

How to strategize your PPC campaigning?

For launching PPC campaigns, it is necessary to determine the present status of your branded keywords. 

• Are you new in your industry? In this case, you won’t be able to attract much traffic. The best thing is to focus on non-branded keywords. 
• When you start building your traffic, investing in branded keywords will bear more results. Here it is vital to bid for your own branded keywords. 

Next comes when you’re an established brand. At this point, your competitors will try to appeal to your target audience using your branded keywords. How to counteract this effect?

Increase your bid value

You can bid for your branded keywords at a higher value than already present. The reason is, nobody else will invest more in your brand keywords. 

Optimize your landing page

Landing pages are the mirror of your online business. Optimizing your landing page for your branded keywords will ensure that you’ll get maximum conversions.

Improve your quality score

Quality Score is how well are you ranking for your keywords. More customers clicking on your ads is an indicator of keywords relevancy. Higher quality will lead to a low cost per click for ads.  

Branded keywords slippery road

You need to check how much traffic you’re getting from branded keywords. If it is 100%, it is a risky affair. It means you’re getting no traffic from non-branded keywords. It is a direct murder of your brand awareness. So, it is time to restrategize your PPC campaigning:

• Do your product non-branded keywords match with the customer search queries?
• Are you focusing on recent trends in the market?
• Is there any new product entrant in your niche market?

It will ensure that branded keywords are not sidelining non-branded keywords. Alongside, it will increase your brand awareness.

Non-branded keywords and PPC 

Branded keywords have the surety of fetching you a good number of target customers. But non-branded keywords have many competitors in the line. Your chances of getting ads in these cases are very minimal. Additionally, it is a big hole in your pocket. 

Generally, marketers don’t prefer PPC for non-branded keywords. Consider keyword “mobiles”. It will have brands bidding for this. Also, you’ll get very traffic due to low rankings. 

Orienting SEO and content marketing

Search engine optimization works great for non-branded keywords. SEO marketers can channelize the power of content marketing for getting organic results. Let it be off-page or on-page optimization. SEO analysts can identify the potential of non-branded keywords. 

If your website is ranking higher for generic keywords, it implies you can get considerable traffic. But, the road to the first page of SERPs is not that easy. PPC gets you instant results. On the other hand, SEO is a step-by-step process.

Also, search intent is the biggest driving engine behind branded and non-branded keywords. When the customer is looking for brand-related products and services, the chances of availing of your services are much higher.

But, many customers haven’t brand-specific choices. How to cover them in your net? You can tap into content with informational intent. Indeed, you can include listings, reviews, compare similar products to cover commercial intent. Place non-branded keywords organically in high-quality content addressing the needs of the customers. You can build content around:

• Articles and blogs: Write relevant blogs for your website targeting non-branded keywords. 
• Strong Visuals: Infographics, compelling visuals, illustrations, graphics help increase your online presence.
• Podcasts and Videos: Podcasts are the audio to touch the customers. And videos are the greatest user engagement elements. 

So, the basic thing is if the intent is not specific, you can tap the potential of increasing your reach online. 

Separating Attribution Marketing  

When a separate road to branded and non-branded keywords becomes necessary to quantify individual results, figure out how many clicks, impressions, conversions, the traffic you’re getting from PPC or SEO.

Branded searches will be affected by referrals, reputation, PPC, and everything excluding organic searches. Do you know paid listings get 1.5x conversions than organic listings? But, you can’t ignore the role of content strategists and the SEO team.

Well, it is justified to say businesses get the lowest hanging fruit with organic results. The marketing team can’t take all the credits. Non-branded keywords are the shortcut route to sales with less input cost. Also, you’ll have permanent traffic with SEO efforts on non-branded keywords. 

Conclusion

In brief, focusing on branded and non-branded keywords will increase your traffic and boost your conversions. It will help reallocate your resources and realign digital marketing efforts. Otherwise, you may go out of the track and not find the right reason for low ROI. So, how are you planning to use branded and non-branded keywords?