In last week”s For the Win Wednesday, we learned about filtering for branded traffic. This week, we’re doing the exact opposite to find what keywords your visitors use that aren’t your brand name. This information is super important for SEO and tracking the impact of SEO on the website.
To start with, jump over to Traffic Sources->Sources->Search->Organic. As you might remember from last week, this report tracks organic search traffic from most search engines, not only Google. You can check out keyphrase traffic from Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc, etc. We’ll use all of their data for now. Next to the filter box, hit the “advanced” link, and replace the “containing” filter with “Matching RegExp”. For Top Draw, I’ve previously filtered for those keyphrases and I know that we don’t really rank on any non-branded phrases that include “Top” or “Draw”, so we should be safe including any keyphrase that includes either of those two phrases. To quickly build a regular expression that matches either of those keywords, I separate them with a pipe ‘|’. I also add in (not provided) to get (not provided)top|draw. This filtering will give me all my non-branded traffic. If you have a lot of misspellings of your brand name, make sure to include those too.
Filtering for non-branded keyphrases can give you an understanding of how many undecided or researching prospects you’re reaching. If you find yourself using this filter often, make it into a new custom advanced segment. Advanced segments can be pulled into most other reports to let you slice and dice with a bit more precision. Personally, I track unbranded search across organic search only, because I really prefer to use it as an SEO metric.
What’s cool is that you can compare this segment against other site traffic to determine performance and quality. The most insightful task I do is compare traffic sources for volume and conversion quality, and this further filtering and segmenting gives you clearer insight into various marketing activities and their efficacy.