Note: This article is part of the collection titled content marketing in less than 300 steps!
A huge search engine referral traffic is the dream of every content marketer for any website. Therefore, sites like Alexa show you the contribution of search traffic to total traffic as a critical performance indicator.
Although every webmaster and content marketer tracks the search engine traffic, most of them are not careful in dividing the search engine traffic to the branded and non-branded segments.
Branded traffic is the traffic of the visitors who already know you and your associated brands. They type your website address or social account directly or search your brand name to reach to your channels.
Branded traffic can be divided into two segments: Direct Branded Visits (DBVs) and Search Engine Branded Visits (SBVs).
People who visit my site by typing the URL address (shabanali.com) are direct branded visits, and the ones who enter this site via searching Shabanali or Webmindset are search engine branded visits.
Branded visit also can be in the long-tail format (e.g., search google for “webmindset content strategy”).
Branded visit and branded traffic can be both a leading and misleading indicator. The growth of branded traffic (direct or via search engines) means you’ve built awareness and have pushed your customers through their journey up to the consideration stage. So it would be a good leading indicator of your future conversions.
However, if you do not exclude them in the search engine traffic analysis, you may not be able to track the success of your SEO strategy, or your indicators even show growth right at the time of the non-branded traffic decline.
This is the reason that every content marketer always tries to segment entrance traffic of the landing pages into two separate segments:
- Branded Traffic, which itself divides into two sub-groups:
- Branded Direct Traffic
- Branded Search Engine Traffic
- Non-Branded Traffic
The former, indicates your brand awareness and trust level of your current audience and the latter, shows your authority and relevance measured by search engines and shown to potential visitors who are not your audience yet.
