What are Branded Keywords?

For SEO and online marketing, keywords are the centerpiece of any well-thought out marketing strategy. Keywords provide your content the visibility it needs in the vast sea of the internet. Branded keywords are keywords which include your company name or anything related to it, whereas a non-branded keyword is a keyword which includes general information related to your product or service. If people are looking specifically for your product or service, branded keywords are a necessity, but including general, non-branded terms can help your brand be found by customers who were previously unaware of it.

Brand-specific search terms give your company authority amongst ambiguity. Including these terms within your website makes your brand easier to find. Using your company’s name is a natural way to link back to your website without making it seem as if you are keyword stuffing.

Using branded search terms also allows you to control the content created about your brand. There are probably numerous articles or reviews written about your company that use branded search terms that you did not create, meaning they may or may not be favorable. Using branded search terms yourself means that you have the opportunity to curate the content written about your brand.

Using branded terms in conjunction with non-branded terms is crucial. In the world of SEO, it’s imperative to ensure that your content is as natural and as genuinely helpful as possible. Google tends to favor websites that seem to offer genuine value and give the information that searchers are looking for. Some companies opt for exclusively using non-branded keywords in their SEO strategy, hoping that this approach will afford them a more “organic” approach to online marketing. However, this is not always the case. You want to use branded keywords in order to build brand recognition to establish your brand as the choice for the product or service that you offer.

If you are a new company, you may want to focus on industry-specific and not brand-specific keywords; this is because your company has not been around long enough for many people to search for it specifically. As searchers grow accustomed to seeing your brand associate with the terms that they search for, they will begin to grown accustomed to seeing your brand associated with those terms.

A great way to figure out how important search terms are to your business is to use Google Adwords External Keyword Research Tool. This is a tool that allows you to view the frequency of search terms related to your brand.