Key takeaways
- Branded search is the highest-converting query you have and the one nobody manages. Most companies have never looked at their own results page carefully.
- What appears there is partly outside your control and largely influenceable: your pages, your profiles, directories, review sites and press.
- Paying for ads on your own name is sometimes justified and often a tax paid out of habit. Decide it with data, not reflex.
- Report branded and non-branded separately, always. Blending them makes every other number in the report unreliable.
Ask a marketing director what appears when someone searches their company name and you will usually get a confident answer that turns out to be wrong. They are describing what they see — logged in, in their own city, having visited the site a thousand times. What a stranger sees is frequently a different page, and occasionally an unflattering one.
This article covers taking that page seriously with the Semalt platform: auditing what actually appears, expanding what you control, handling the results you do not control, and reporting brand and non-brand in a way that keeps the rest of your numbers honest.
Why the brand results page matters more than it seems
Three reasons, and the third is the one that surprises people.
First, it is where the highest-intent visitors arrive. Someone typing your company name is already considering you — they heard about you, saw an advert, were referred by a colleague. This is the last step before contact, and it is the query most likely to convert on the entire site.
Second, it is where due diligence happens. Before a meaningful purchase, someone will search your name to check that you exist, look competent and are not the subject of complaints. What they find shapes the conversation before you are in the room.
Third — the surprising one — it is a substantial share of what most people call "SEO results". Branded traffic frequently makes up half or more of organic sessions, which means a report that blends brand and non-brand is largely measuring the effect of other channels while presenting it as search performance.
See also: From Keyword List to Topic Map.
Framing used throughout this article rather than measured benchmarks.
The half-hour audit
- Search your name as a stranger would
Private window, logged out, and ideally from a different location than your office. Screenshot the whole first page including everything above the classic results.
- Classify every result
Owned (your site, your profiles), influenced (directories, review sites, partner pages), or outside your control (press, forums, complaint sites, competitors). Count how many of each.
- Check the panel and the profile
If a knowledge panel or business profile appears, verify every field: name, category, hours, address, description. Outdated details here are visible to everyone and cheap to fix.
- Search the variants
Your name with "reviews", "opinions", "complaints", "alternatives", "price", and common misspellings. This is where the uncomfortable results live and where nobody looks.
The most common finding. An abandoned profile on a platform nobody has logged into since 2019, ranking third for the company name, with an old address and a two-star average from four reviews. It is not a crisis and it is exactly the kind of thing that costs enquiries quietly. Reclaiming or removing it is usually a single afternoon of administrative work.
Expanding what you own
The realistic goal is that the results a stranger sees are mostly yours or mostly favourable. That is achieved by having more legitimate properties rather than by suppressing anything.
Assets worth having indexed
- A real about page with named people and photographs
- An active business profile with current information
- Profiles on the platforms your industry actually uses
- Case studies and client references
- Press coverage and interviews, however modest
Things that do not help
- Empty profiles created on twenty platforms at once
- Microsites built purely to occupy a result slot
- Press releases published only to be indexed
- Attempts to remove legitimate criticism
The distinction is whether the asset would exist anyway if search did not. A genuine about page, a maintained profile, real coverage — all of these serve people and happen to rank. Assets built purely to fill results are transparent to readers, and increasingly to engines.
We cover this in detail in Is It Worth Competing? Reading the Results Page Before Investing in a Topic.
Handling results you do not control
Sooner or later something unflattering appears: a complaint thread, a critical review, a comparison that ranks you second. The instinct is suppression, which is usually both ineffective and counterproductive.
What works, in order of usefulness. Respond publicly and well — a measured, specific reply to a complaint is read by everyone who finds it later, and it frequently does more for the impression than the complaint does against it. Fix the underlying cause if the criticism is fair, since the same complaint will otherwise recur under different headings. And publish the material that answers the concern directly, so that someone researching the issue finds your side of it in the same results page.
What does not work: attempting removal of legitimate criticism, which frequently amplifies it; creating fake positive reviews, which is detectable and terminal for trust when found; and legal threats over ordinary negative opinions, which have a reliable habit of becoming the story.
Paying for your own name
This question arrives at least once a year and deserves a real answer rather than a policy.
Bidding on your own brand is justified when competitors are bidding on it and appearing above you, when you have a specific promotion that the organic result cannot communicate, or when the organic result for your name is a third-party page rather than your own site. In those cases the cost buys something identifiable.
It is not justified when you already rank first organically with a good result and nobody else is bidding — you are then paying for clicks you were going to receive anyway. The test is straightforward and rarely run: pause the brand campaign for two weeks and measure total branded traffic and conversions, not just the paid share. Many companies discover they have been paying a tax out of caution.
Track your own brand terms deliberately. Most tracked keyword sets exclude the company name because "we already rank first for that". Include it anyway, in its own group. It is how you notice a competitor starting to bid against you, a review site climbing into position two, or your own result being replaced by a directory listing — all of which are visible immediately and otherwise discovered by accident.
Two cases that change the playbook
The advice above assumes an established company with an established name. Two situations behave differently enough to be worth separating.
A new or renamed company. Here the problem is not what appears but that nothing does, and the gap is usually filled by something else entirely — a similarly named business, a common word, a foreign company. The fix is unglamorous and effective: publish the obvious pages, claim the obvious profiles, and get the name mentioned in a handful of places that already have standing. This takes weeks rather than days, and it is worth doing before any launch campaign sends people to search a name that returns someone else.
There is a full walkthrough in SEO for SaaS and Startups.
The naming decision itself deserves a search check that almost nobody runs. Before committing, search the candidate name and see what already occupies it. A name that collides with an established brand, a common phrase or a foreign company means every marketing euro will partly fund somebody else's traffic — and that is much cheaper to discover before the signage is printed.
A rebrand or a merger. The risk here is losing the accumulated recognition of the old name, and the mistake is switching everything at once and treating the old name as retired. It is not retired: people will search it for years. Keep a page explaining the change, redirect the old domain permanently rather than for a season, and keep tracking the old name as its own group. Watching branded search migrate from the old name to the new one over eighteen months is also the clearest measure you will get of whether the rebrand actually landed.
Reporting brand and non-brand separately
This is the single most consequential reporting decision in search, and it is the one most commonly skipped.
| Metric | What it actually tells you |
|---|---|
| Branded organic | How well other channels are creating demand, and whether you are capturing it |
| Non-branded organic | Whether search work is finding new audiences — the actual SEO result |
| Ratio between them | Whether growth is coming from awareness or from discovery |
The third row is more useful than it looks. Rising branded traffic with flat non-branded generally means your marketing is working and your SEO is not. Rising non-branded with flat branded means the opposite. A blended number tells you neither, and can show comfortable growth while the part you are being paid for is stalled.
Working in a small market where reputation travels
In Portugal, and in Lisbon particularly, professional sectors are small enough that reputation is genuinely networked. The person searching your company name has often already been given an opinion by someone they know, and the search is a confirmation step rather than a discovery one.
Two practical consequences. The named-people part of your site matters more here than the generic corporate copy — visitors are frequently checking whether the person they were told about actually works there. And a single unresolved public complaint carries further in a small professional community than the same complaint would in a large market, which makes the habit of responding well an unusually good investment.
The upside is symmetrical: modest, genuine press coverage and a handful of specific client references go further here than they would elsewhere, because there are fewer competing signals for a searcher to weigh.
Where to start
Run the half-hour audit this week. Search your name from outside your own network, screenshot the result, and count what you own, what you influence and what you do not control. Most companies have never done this, and most find at least one item worth fixing immediately — usually an abandoned profile or an outdated field in a business listing.
Then separate brand from non-brand in your reporting, permanently. Every other number becomes more trustworthy the moment those two are apart.
If your tracked keyword set does not currently include your own name, add it today. Open the dashboard, create a branded group with the company name, its misspellings and the "reviews" and "alternatives" variants, and watch what shows up in it.
Frequently asked questions
Should we pay for ads on our own brand name?
Only with a reason: competitors bidding above you, a promotion the organic result cannot communicate, or a third-party page outranking your own site. If you already rank first with a good result and nobody is bidding against you, run the test — pause the campaign for two weeks and measure total branded traffic and conversions rather than the paid share alone.
A negative review ranks for our company name. What can we do?
Respond publicly and specifically — a measured reply is read by everyone who finds the thread later and often does more good than the complaint does harm. Fix the underlying cause if the criticism is fair. Publish material that addresses the concern directly so your side appears in the same results page. Do not pursue removal of legitimate criticism or legal threats over opinions; both reliably amplify what they were meant to bury.
Why separate branded from non-branded traffic?
Because they measure different things. Branded traffic reflects demand other channels created; non-branded reflects whether search work is reaching new audiences. Blended, they can show comfortable growth while the part you are actually paying for is flat — and once a client notices that, every other number in the report loses credibility.
Should we build extra sites to fill our brand results page?
No. Microsites and empty profiles created purely to occupy result slots are obvious to readers and add nothing. Build assets that would be worth having anyway — a real about page with named people, maintained profiles on platforms your industry uses, case studies, genuine coverage. Those rank because they deserve to, and they hold up when someone actually clicks.
Open your Semalt dashboard
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