Split brand vs non-brand search traffic

Headline organic traffic blends two different things: people who already knew the brand and typed it in, and people who found the site by searching for a problem. Only the second one is SEO. A site whose total clicks are growing while non-brand clicks are flat is not gaining ground in search; it is gaining ground in brand awareness.

Steps

1. Get the brand terms. Ask the user for the brand name, product names and common misspellings if they are not obvious. Build one case-insensitive regex from them, for example (?i)acme|acmehq|ackme. Search Console regex is RE2 syntax.

2. Pull the two trends. Two calls to google_search_console.query with dimensions: ["date"] over the last 16 weeks ending 3 days ago. One with filters: [{ dimension: "query", operator: "includingRegex", expression: "<brand regex>" }], one with operator: "excludingRegex" and the same expression. Also run the unfiltered call so you have the true total.

3. Pull the page view. Repeat both filtered calls with dimensions: ["page"] over the last 28 days. This shows which pages carry non-brand traffic, which is the list of pages doing real SEO work.

4. Compute share and trend. Non-brand share of clicks, non-brand week-over-week trend, brand trend. Compare the two slopes. Non-brand growth is the SEO KPI; report it as such.

5. Report. Two trend lines (brand, non-brand), the current non-brand share, the top ten non-brand pages and queries, and one sentence on what the headline number is hiding. If the unattributed gap from the first gotcha is large, say so and give its size.

Gotchas

• Filtered totals do not sum to the unfiltered total. Search Console omits anonymised low-volume queries from any query-filtered result, so brand plus non-brand will come in below the true total. Report the difference as "unattributed", never fold it into non-brand.
• Brand plus a modifier is still brand. "acme pricing" and "acme vs competitor" are branded queries. The regex catches them; do not hand-correct them into non-brand.
• Homepage traffic is mostly brand. If non-brand clicks land heavily on the homepage, check the queries; a generic homepage rarely ranks non-brand and this usually means the regex missed a brand variant.
• Search Console lags 2 to 3 days. End every window 3 days back.