A very valuable metric in determining the performance of your SEO efforts is the brand / non-brand ratio. This is a measure of brand-related keywords to non-brand related keywords that helps to indicate how well your site is drawing traffic that wasn’t specifically looking for your product or brand. It’s a useful measure, but also one that can at first be a bit tricky to interpret, because while a lower b/nb ratio can mean your SEO efforts are succeeding, it can also be an indicator that your PR efforts are not doing as well as they could (due to lack of brand awareness).
When I was first starting out in the world of SEO, I was working with sites where the number of keywords that organic search traffic used to find a site was low. This made it feasible to simply go into Google Analytics and count the ratio by hand. As the site traffic (and the number of keywords used to find that site) grew, this became an increasingly arduous task.
My solution to this problem was to create an Excel spreadsheet that you can use to automate the calculation of the metric. Simply export your keyword data from Google Analytics as “.csv for Excel” and copy and paste the keywords into the Brand / Non-Brand Ratio Calculator spreadsheet. Enter in your brand-related terms in the box, and the spreadsheet will do the calculations for you.
Download the Brand / Non-Brand Ratio Calculator for FREE.
If you have any comments or suggestions for improvement, I definitely welcome your feedback.
Thanks and enjoy!
