Branded search largely reflects demand created elsewhere - ads, PR, word of mouth - and mixing it into SEO reporting hides whether the work is doing anything. A simple filter on the brand name is not enough: misspellings, product names, staff names and domain-string searches are all branded and all leak through.
separate-branded-from-nonbranded.md
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name: separate-branded-from-nonbranded
description: Use when reporting SEO performance or sizing opportunity and branded search is inflating the numbers.
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# Separate Branded From Non-Branded Properly
Branded search largely reflects demand created elsewhere - ads, PR, word of mouth - and mixing it into SEO reporting hides whether the work is doing anything. A simple filter on the brand name is not enough: misspellings, product names, staff names and domain-string searches are all branded and all leak through.
## What you need first
- full Search Console query export
- a list of brand names, product names, common misspellings and any acquired brands
- agreement with stakeholders on what counts as branded
## Method
1. Build a regex covering the brand, plural and possessive forms, spacing variants, the domain with and without the TLD, and every misspelling that appears in the export with more than a handful of impressions.
2. Add trademarked product names and any founder or spokesperson name, which behave as branded even though they do not contain the company name.
3. Create a third bucket for hybrid queries such as brand plus a category term. These are neither pure brand nor pure discovery and should be reported separately, because they indicate consideration not awareness.
4. Recompute all headline metrics with branded excluded, and expect a large drop - a fall from 60 percent to 25 percent branded share is common once misspellings are captured.
5. Track branded impressions separately as a proxy for brand demand, so a marketing campaign is not misread as an SEO win or a paid pause misread as an SEO loss.
6. Re-audit the regex quarterly, because new products and new misspellings appear continuously and a stale filter silently reintroduces brand traffic.
## What this produces
A branded, non-branded and hybrid segmentation of query data with a documented regex anyone can reproduce.
## Where this goes wrong
- Filtering on the exact brand string only, which misses the misspellings that often make up a fifth of branded volume.
- Excluding hybrid queries as branded, thereby hiding the terms with the best conversion rates on the site.
- Comparing non-branded performance across a period when the brand filter definition changed, producing a fake trend.
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From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/separate-branded-from-nonbranded
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A branded, non-branded and hybrid segmentation of query data with a documented regex anyone can reproduce.