Branded search filtering

How do you know if your SDO campaign is working? A lot of people's first intuition Is going to be keyword ranking.

However, rank tracking is unreliable. Take this example where A or F is showing that their traffic Is down based on ranking data, Even though I know it to be up.

In fact, you should only rely on keyword ranking data When you don't have access to search traffic data. The best source for search traffic data is Google Search Console.

It's completely free to set up. It'll walk you to this types of connecting it And it's data straight from Google.

It'll show you how many times you actually showed up For a given keyword and how many of those times Someone clicked through to your website And what page they landed on. So if search traffic is going up, The SDO campaign is working, right?

Not quite. A fear of business, what you really care about is sales.

Let's take this window tinting shop, for example. The page on their website getting the most search traffic Is this blog post on HadroPair CarPaint.jit.

Now, blog posts are great. We write them for all of our clients...

sinesses, you would rather have one visit To one of these transactional pages Than a thousand visits to your blog. If there are some exceptions, some blog posts Do convert much better than others.

But for the most part, this to these transactional pages Are what you really care about. So how do you isolate the traffic to your transactional pages?

We're going to use Regic. Now, don't worry.

It sounds scary, but I made a tool, and it's super easy. You're just going to pull up this advanced URL To GSC Regic's tool.

In the exact URLs, you're going to paste the URL To each of your transactional pages. This is going to be your home page, the page Google Business Profile links to each Of your service pages or product and category pages.

You can put in the exact URLs, or if your site follows A domain structure that has the same subfolder For all of your service pages or product pages, Like it would on Shopify, you could just put something like product Right here in URLs that contain...

an SEO problem. That's a website problem.

When we're trying to measure the effectiveness Of your SEO campaign, we want to ignore All branded search traffic. To do that, hit this new button, add a query filter.

We're going to go again to custom regx. And then we're going to enter in every word that Is in your brand name that we're confident would not Be in a non-branding search.

For most companies, this is pretty easy, Although there are some rare ones where your brand name Is your product name, and it can be almost impossible To sort this out. For this company, their brand terms Are always going to use the word elite.

And it shouldn't take out any of their non-branded terms, Because it's not a word you would typically use when Looking for the service. If there were common acronyms or misspellings, You could add a pipe here and add them each, And you can do as many as you want.

Just make sure none of them would block non-branded terms. And in this time, we're going to set this To doesn't match regx and hit apply...

busy than others. And if we compare it to the last three months, We won't know if it's seasonality Or actual ranking changes.

Go ahead and hit apply. Now with some quick math, we can see That their overall SEO traffic has gone up By 41% since last year.

And we can see which queries it's gone up for the most. Window tinting near me is the clear winner.

We can see which pages have improved the most. And this is the SEO data that you really care about.

This is how you know your SEO campaign is working.