Almost every article about branding and SEO says the same thing. Build a strong brand, and search engines will reward you. Then it stops, because the next sentence would have to explain how, and there isn't a clean answer.
So let me start with the part that is concrete.
Nobody can search for your name until they know your name. That sentence is the whole relationship between branding and SEO, and it produces a number you can look at today: how many people typed your company name into Google in the last three months. Search Console will tell you. It is the closest thing to a brand awareness meter that a small business gets for free.
Everything else in this article hangs off that.
My name is Evan Ernst. I run Ernst Media, a seven-person digital marketing agency in Spokane, Washington. We've been doing this since 2026, mostly for small businesses that have to justify every dollar of marketing spend to themselves.
This is the version of the branding-and-SEO conversation I'd have with a client, including the parts that are less flattering to the idea.
Where Branding and SEO Actually Meet
Branding is the work of becoming a name people recognize. SEO is the work of being findable when someone goes looking. Of all the types of digital marketing a small business can run, these two get bundled together the most and overlap the least. Most of the time they run on separate tracks.
They touch in one specific place: branded search.
A branded search is someone typing your company name, a variation of it, or your name plus a product, into a search engine. "Ernst Media." "Ernst Media Spokane." "Ernst Media reviews." Those searches can only happen after some earlier moment where the person encountered you — an ad, a referral, a podcast, a jobsite sign, a blog post like this one.
That gives you a chain you can follow:
- Brand work puts your name in front of people.
- Some of those people go to Google and type your name.
- Those searches show up as branded impressions in Search Console.
- Because they already know who you are, they arrive with a decision half made.
Step four is the part that matters commercially. Someone searching "digital marketing agency" is shopping. Someone searching "Ernst Media" has already narrowed to one. Same channel, completely different conversation on the other end of the form.
That's the mechanism. It is unglamorous and it is real, and you can watch it move.
How to Measure Branded Search in Search Console
Here is the actual sequence. It takes about ten minutes.
Open Google Search Console and go to Performance → Search results. Set the date range to the last three months and compare it to the previous three months.
Add a filter on Query, choose Custom (regex), and enter your brand name plus the ways people misspell it, separated by pipes. Ours would look roughly like ernst media|ernstmedia|earnst media. Save that as a bookmark, because you'll want to run it again.
Now note three things:
- Branded impressions. This is your awareness number. It moves when more people know your name.
- Branded clicks and CTR. These should be high. If somebody searches your exact company name and doesn't click your site, something is wrong — usually a competitor bidding on your name, a stale directory listing outranking you, or a review page eating the click.
- Your average position on your own name. It should be 1. If it isn't, fix that before you spend another dollar on awareness, because you're paying to send people to somebody else's page.
Then invert the regex filter to get everything except your brand, and you have your non-branded numbers. The ratio between the two, tracked quarter over quarter, tells you more about the health of your marketing than most dashboards do.
One warning about the timing. Branded search lags the work that creates it. A campaign that runs in March shows up in branded impressions in April and May. If you check the week after a launch and see nothing, that's normal. Compare quarters, not weeks.
Branded and Non-Branded Keywords Do Different Jobs
Both belong in a strategy, but they are not interchangeable, and the order matters.
Branded Keywords
Branded keywords are search terms containing your company name, a variation, or a product you're known for. You are not really competing for these — you already own the strongest signal, which is that the query is your name. What you're doing is defending them and making sure the results page tells the story you want.
That means owning the pages people land on when they look you up: your homepage, an about page, your service pages, your Google Business Profile, and any review profile that outranks you. If a five-year-old directory listing with a wrong phone number sits above your site on your own name, that is a branding problem and an SEO problem at once.
Optimizing for branded terms also means giving people something to find once curiosity strikes. Case studies, testimonials, a clear description of who you work with. That's what converts a branded search into a conversation.
Non-Branded Keywords
Non-branded keywords are the general terms your customers use before they know you exist. "Google Ads for plumbers." "How much does SEO cost."
These do the awareness work. Someone finds an article, learns something, and now your name exists in their head. Weeks later they search that name. Non-branded content is what creates branded search in the first place, which is why the sequencing runs one way and not the other.
It also means the two keyword types map onto different stages of the marketing funnel. Non-branded terms catch people at the top, before they have a shortlist. Branded terms catch them at the bottom, after you're on it. Judging a non-branded article by the leads it closed this month is judging the wrong end of the funnel, and it's the most common reason clients kill content work early.
If nobody knows your name yet, spending your effort on branded terms accomplishes nothing. There is no volume to capture. Do the non-branded work first.
This article is an example of the non-branded side. It targets terms about branding and SEO strategy, which sit inside Ernst Media's core specialties. Somewhere in it you learned that a Spokane agency called Ernst Media exists. That's the entire trick, and it isn't subtle once you see it.
The two steps that make non-branded content work:
Understanding the types of SEO keywords so you target terms that are genuinely relevant and not already locked up by national competitors
Creating educational content that answers a real question your customers ask
If you're still weighing whether search deserves a share of your budget at all, that argument is in this article, and it's a fair thing to settle first.
What a Strong Brand Does Not Do
This is where I have to correct something. An earlier version of this article said that branded searches send positive signals to Google and that this "has been proven multiple times to be an important factor for website rankings." It also called brand mentions a ranking factor. I no longer think either sentence is defensible, so here is the more careful version.
Google does not publish a "brand strength" input, and there is no way for you or me to observe one. Claiming that a stronger brand causes higher rankings dresses up a hunch as a mechanism.
What is defensible is narrower and still useful:
- Branded search volume is a demand signal you can measure. It tells you whether awareness is growing. That is worth tracking on its own merits, whatever Google does with it.
- Brand awareness produces things that do affect search. Known companies get written about, cited and linked to. Links are a ranking factor Google has confirmed. The path runs brand → coverage → links → rankings, and each of those steps is a real, observable event rather than an assumed signal.
- Recognition changes behavior on a results page. When ten blue links look alike, people click the name they've heard of. That's a claim about humans, not about an algorithm.
There is also a correlation worth knowing about. After a Helpful Content Update, Tom Capper published an analysis on Moz finding that sites with many backlinks and little brand search volume tended to lose visibility, while sites with more brand search and fewer links tended to gain. That is a pattern across a sample, not a documented ranking factor, and it deserves to be read as the former. It's still a good reason not to buy links in bulk — you can pay for spam that hurts you, and it doesn't build the thing that appears to correlate with holding up.
If you want a sane way to think about search spend without the link brokers, what small business SEO actually costs covers it.
Does Your Brand Name Matter?
A distinctive name is easier to remember, easier to spell, and easier to rank for. A generic one competes with dictionary results forever.
That's a real consideration if you're naming a startup. It is almost never a reason to rebrand an established company. The cost of a rebrand is enormous and the search upside is thin. Consistency is worth more than cleverness here: the same name, spelled the same way, in the same places, for years.
Four Things to Actually Do
1. Baseline your branded search this week
Run the regex filter above and write the number down. Three months of impressions, branded and non-branded. You cannot tell whether branding is working without a starting point, and the starting point only exists if someone records it.
2. Own your own name in the results
Search your company name in an incognito window. Look at the whole first page. Anything above you, anything outdated, anything you don't control — that's your list.
3. Publish for the questions that come before you
Non-branded, educational, specific. The ones your customers ask on the first call. This is what feeds branded search six months out, which is exactly why most businesses quit before it pays.
4. Recheck quarterly, not weekly
Compare quarter to quarter. Branded impressions rising while non-branded holds steady means awareness is growing. Both flat means whatever you're doing isn't reaching anyone new yet.
When This Isn't Worth Doing
I'd rather say this than sell you something.
If you need customers in the next 60 days, this is the wrong project. Branded search grows over quarters. Paid search buys demand that already exists, today, and that's the honest answer for a business with a short runway. Our minimum ad spend is $500 a month for exactly that kind of work.
If you're one person with no capacity to publish anything, the content half of this won't happen, and a strategy that doesn't happen isn't a strategy. Fix your Google Business Profile, get your name right everywhere it appears, and leave the rest until you have hands to do it — yours or ours, through small business SEO services.
And if you already rank first on your own name, get plenty of branded traffic and simply want more of it, the constraint isn't SEO. It's awareness. That's a different budget line.
We work at $95 an hour, month to month, no contracts, so there's nothing to sign before you find out whether any of this applies to you. If you want a second opinion on what your Search Console is telling you, ask.
Founder of Ernst Media. Fifteen years running paid search and paid social for small and mid-size businesses, and still the person who builds the audits by hand. Writes here about what actually moves accounts.