Ranking for Your Own Name and Nothing Else

Two kinds of search visitor

Somebody typing your business name already knows you exist, from a van, a recommendation, or a card.

Somebody typing what you do and where has never heard of you and is choosing.

The first group would have found you anyway, and the second is the group a website is supposed to produce.

Almost every report treats them as one number, which is how a business can appear to be doing well in search while finding nobody new.

Splitting the two

• Open your search console query list.
• Filter for your business name.
• Note the clicks.
• Then filter it out.
• Note that figure too.

Those two numbers are the whole exercise, and for a lot of small businesses the second is far smaller than anybody expected. Include misspellings of your name in the filter, since a good share of branded searches get it slightly wrong and would otherwise be counted as unbranded.

What the ratio tells you

Since it is the diagnostic rather than either figure alone.

Mostly branded means the site is a destination for people already sent there, which is a legitimate job and is not discovery.

A healthy proportion unbranded means the site is genuinely bringing in people who did not know you.

And a rise in branded searches over time is a good sign of something else working, since it means more people are hearing your name somewhere.

So branded searches are worth tracking as a measure of your other marketing rather than of your website.

Both numbers are useful and they answer different questions.

A worked example

A business was pleased with steady growth in search traffic and had been paying for work on it for two years.

Splitting the queries showed that almost all the growth was people searching the business name, which had risen because they had started sponsoring a local team and putting the name on two more vans.

Unbranded traffic was flat across the whole period.

The search work had not been producing anything and the vans had.

They redirected the budget toward pages answering specific questions with prices, which is where unbranded traffic actually comes from.

It took eighteen months to become substantial, which is the honest timescale.

Where unbranded traffic comes from

Since the answer is narrower than it sounds.

Pages answering a specific question somebody types.

Service pages naming a place and a price.

Your local listing, which is where most local unbranded discovery actually happens.

And pages about a specific problem rather than a category.

What does not produce it is a home page, an about page, or anything describing the business in general terms, which is where most sites put their effort.

Beware of reports that combine them

A practical warning, since this is where it matters commercially.

A monthly report showing search traffic up twenty per cent is meaningless without the split, and a supplier is unlikely to volunteer it.

Ask for branded and unbranded separately, every month, which is a reasonable request and takes them two minutes.

Where a supplier resists or does not know how, that tells you something on its own.

The same applies to your own reporting, since it is easy to congratulate yourself on a number that measures your signwriting.

Being first for your name still matters

Worth stating, since this is not an argument for ignoring it.

Somebody who was recommended you and searches your name must find you rather than a competitor, a directory, or a review site.

Losing that costs work directly, and it happens where a business has a common name or a competitor is advertising against it.

Check that you own the whole first page for your own name, including the listing, the site, and ideally your social profiles.

That is a low bar and a genuine requirement, and it is simply not evidence about anything else the site is doing.

Watch the two numbers separately over time

Which is the ongoing habit.

Record both monthly, in the same place as your enquiry count.

Branded rising means your name is getting about, which is your advertising, your vehicles, and your customers talking.

Unbranded rising means your pages are finding people, which is the site working.

Either falling is a signal, and it is a different signal, which is the entire point of separating them.

Somebody else may be bidding on your name

A specific thing to check while you are looking at this, since it costs you directly.

Competitors can pay to appear above your listing when somebody searches your business name, which is permitted and reasonably common in some trades.

The person searching was recommended you and is shown somebody else first, which is the most expensive click anybody can take from you.

Search your own name from a phone, signed out, and look at what sits above your result.

Where a competitor is there, the usual answers are to bid on your own name, which is cheap because it is your name, or to accept it and make sure your listing below is obviously better.

The counter-case

Branded traffic converts far better.

Somebody who searched your name is closer to hiring you than anybody who typed a category, so branded visitors are worth more each.

For some businesses, particularly established local ones, being the place people go after a recommendation is genuinely most of what a site is for.

And a new business has no name to search for, so early traffic being unbranded is not a sign of strength.

For a business three months old, almost everything will be unbranded by default, and the branded figure rising later is the thing to watch.

Split the two, report them separately, and judge the website on the unbranded figure.

The ten minutes

1. Open the query list.
2. Filter for your name and misspellings.
3. Record the clicks.
4. Filter your name out.
5. Record that figure.
6. Ask suppliers for both separately.
7. Track both monthly.

Step four produces the number that actually answers whether the website is finding you customers, and it is the one almost nobody has ever looked at.

What that looks like when it is failing is covered in a local site that ranks for nothing.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.