I'm having a hard time understanding branded keywords. When wouldn't I want to brand a keyword?

[PolarisWebSEO]

For example, why wouldn't I want to brand all my keywords with my company name?

[Jungles]

Hi William,

It's easy - if you have high visible brand that delivers you great traffic (or you are planning to build one like that) you are tightening together keywords that you are targeting because you creating a bridge between Visibility, Marketing and Conversions.

Example: shoes + your brand name.

If you ever will be brave enough to even think that you could rank your website for keyword 'shoes' - good luck with that! But it is really possible  to do for 'Shoes +your brand name' keyword as it will be unique, without any competition and therefore supper easy to rank! It is something like cut the piece of the 'shoes' keyword traffic which is like supper HUGE!

Regards,

Jungles

[Matt-Williamson]

branded keywords are those that include your brand and none branded are the generic terms which will take more work and are likely to drive a lot of traffic from generic searches people put in if they don't know your brand. So for instance if I was searching for beer instead of Budweiser beer then ranking highly and gaining traffic from the none branded search would be useful to know as a segment and it would give you a guide as to how your search engine rankings are going.

[PolarisWebSEO]

Thanks! That clears it up a lot. But why wouldn't I want to add locations and city names to brand keywords?

For example 'plumbing + city'. I know I won't rank for plumbing, but what about when I add the city in there?

[Jungles]

Will,

It makes great sense to look at the 'plumbing + city' in terms of ranking difficulty! It is certainly clear that 'plumbing' is something that you will not rank and 'plumbing + city' will be a way better! Just put your self in shoes of the customer - you will look for plumbing thingies in city,area or anywhere where is nearest to the place where you seeking this service for.

At this case - customer's logic + keywords will generate the best leads and will not ask you terrible much effort to rank in Google  by those keywords.

So, use ether - city, area or other popular terms + service name. Easiest way to start!

Best,

Jungles

[CMC-SD]

I'm not sure what you mean by "why wouldn't I want to brand all my keywords with my company name." Are you asking if you should only optimize for keywords like "companyname shoes"? Unless your company is a leader in the industry, that wouldn't work very well.

[JoelDay]

Hi William,

Thanks for the question. It looks like you've got a few great answers already. I thought I would weigh in as well.

Branded keywords will be important for you to monitor how effective your branding efforts are. You'll also want non-branded keywords to help you to analyze how well your SEO efforts as a whole are doing. It's not required to have either, but I recommended it.

I hope that helps.
Cheers,
Joel.