Branded Keywords

What are Branded Keywords?

Branded keywords are any search queries that are directly associated with your brand, products, or services. Most often, they contain brand names in them. For instance, “Ahrefs seo tool” and “ahrefs blog” are among our branded keywords.

Why are branded keywords important?

It may seem counterintuitive to try to optimize for your branded keywords. If the searcher already knows about your brand, then isn’t the work already done? 

On the contrary, the searchers who are already aware of your brand are some of the most critical to attract. Because they’ve already passed the first stage of the buyer’s journey, it’s low-hanging fruit to get in front of them and help move them further down the funnel.

Branded searches usually have navigational intent, so ranking for your branded keywords can help your potential customers find you faster.

You may also be wondering: shouldn’t my site automatically rank highly since my brand is unique to me? While you may rank for your short-tail brand name, it’s possible that other sites may be outranking you for your long-tail branded keywords.

For instance, according to Ahrefs Site Explorer, there are almost 4k branded keywords where the famous watchmaker Casio does not rank in the top 3 with their website in the US:

How to optimize for branded keywords

Identify your branded keywords

Before you start optimizing for the branded keywords, you first need to identify all the branded keyword variations that you can rank for.

To find the keywords you rank for, simply open the Performance report in Google Search Console and type in the words/phrases denoting your brand or products in the filters. Then export this list into a spreadsheet; we’ll need it later.

If you don’t have access to the website’s Search Console, you can do a similar thing in our free Ahrefs Webmasters Tools.

To find more branded keyword ideas, including those you don’t rank for, you’ll need a keyword tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Plug in the branded keywords from your spreadsheet and hit “Enter.” Then go to the Matching terms report to get a list of all branded keywords.

Now you have a list of branded keywords to work with. 

Remember that if you want to reach searchers in multiple countries, you want to repeat this process for each country.

2. Choose which keywords to target

There are several types of branded keywords worth targeting:

• Underperforming keywords: identify any keywords that rank lower than #1, and see if there’s a way you can create content to help optimize for them.
• Pages with mismatched intent: you may have keywords that rank #1 but don’t give the user what they’re looking for. Adjust your content to make sure the page with the right intent can rank #1 for that keyword.
• Valuable new keywords: the high-search-volume keywords that you can target and increase traffic.

3. Add internal links

Anchoring your branded words with internal links can help Google understand your site structure and reinforce your branded keywords. Some high-impact areas to add internal links include:

• Site navigation
• Important pages
• Pages where you mention branded keywords

You can also use Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool and open the Link opportunities report to find branded keywords that you can add internal links to.