Webinar Insights | SEO for Branded Search

Branded search results represent who your brand is and what you do. It is vital from a business perspective to get search engines to display your brand’s message to your audience in the way you want when anyone searches for your company’s brand name. This article walks you through some key insights from our recent webinar with a panel of expert speakers, including Brand SERP Guy himself, Jason Barnard.

3 Types of Branded Search

The three broad categories of branded search are:

Exact Match — otherwise known as a brand SERP, this is how your brand appears in a search engine when someone searches your brand name either to navigate to your site or find out information about your business
Branded — this category is based on how your brand appears for purely informational search queries related to what you do
Product — these pages are what users see when they search for commercial queries about products or services

Brand SERPs - Informational and Navigational

For large brands, exact match results are often navigational, which means that the search result for that brand presents links to various pages on the site. The reason for the search result being navigational is that when searching for well-known brands, such as Facebook, searchers typically just want to go straight to the website.

For lesser-known brands, exact match results have a more informational slant. The search engine provides information about what the brand does. This information often comes from services like Google My Business.

In either case, the brand SERP represents the search engine’s understanding of your brand and your relationship with your audience. Among the three types of branded search, it’s helpful to start by optimizing how your brand appears in exact match search results. Getting well-optimized for exact match results provides a solid foundation for any other types of branded search queries.

Who Are Branded Search Results Important For?

All three categories of branded search - exact match, branded, and product, are important for the following three parties.

The A-list of people who really matter to your business. These people include clients, prospects, investors, and partners. Think of your branded search results as a business card for your company to get an indication of its importance for this group of people. When searching for your brand, if the search results don’t look credible or professional, potential prospects, clients, and partners might consider other businesses.
Google (and other search engines) also see brand search queries as important. You can think in terms of these search results being the search engine’s opinion of how the world sees your business. If Google thinks you have strong expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T), your branded search results will look great.
Branded searches are important to you as the owner or stakeholder of a business. These pages give a window into your digital ecosystem by informing you about what search engines think you’re audience is interested in and what’s important about your business. Diving deeper into pages two and beyond of search results can provide great information about what you’re conveying to search engines about your brand.

So, what can you do? Start with the brand SERP and work to educate Google so that it builds your brand SERP to serve your audience the way that you want. This means thinking about your site and its pages (about page, Contact Us, etc), your social media presence, your content strategy both on-site and off-site, reviews, and PR.

Search Terms That Contain The Brand Name

This second category of branded search queries includes post-funnel and bottom-of-funnel searches, such as “Brand X Revenue”, “Who Owns Brand X”. Approaching this category from a question and answers perspective proves useful because you can start to think about the questions people ask about your brand and answer them on your website.

The actionable strategy here is to get a dedicated FAQ page on your site that answers all the questions you can think of about your brand and your products or services. Organize this FAQ into categories so that users can easily find the question they want to answer. Make the answers collapsible by default so that users aren’t inundated with thousands of words on the FAQ section.

You can also create How-To Videos and product/service demonstrations. By making these simple changes, you’ll start to dominate organic results, featured snippets, and People Also Ask sections for search terms that contain your brand name.

Commercial Branded Search Queries

These search queries are for products and services that brands sell. An example is “Adidas Stan Smiths”. To optimize well for these queries, you need to treat your unique products or services as entities. An entity is a well-defined concept that you can link to a knowledge graph. The interesting thing here is that when viewing products or services as an entity, you loop back to the first category of exact match brand SERPs. The optimal SEO strategy for commercial branded searches is, therefore, to build a great brand SERP, or entity SERP, for all of your products or services.

Quick Wins for Branded Search

To round things off, here are some quick wins for improving your branded search results:

Fully complete your business listing in Google My Business and in any other search engines that have similar services
Get a basic site structure in place with actual content on your About and Contact pages
Audit the schema on your site’s pages to make sure there are no technical errors. Schema is a type of microcode that provides search engines with extra information about your pages, which they can use to provide rich results
Look at competitors’ branded search pages and other industry leaders who have rich, professional results and use what you see as inspiration for your own branded search strategy
Post about business promotions and other announcements on Twitter and any other social media streams that appear for your brand

Core web vitals: What agencies need to know in 2026

By Shawn Davis • April 1, 2026

Core Web Vitals aren't new, Google introduced them in 2020 and made them a ranking factor in 2021. But the questions keep coming, because the metrics keep changing and the stakes keep rising. Reddit's SEO communities were still debating their impact as recently as January 2026, and for good reason: most agencies still don't have a clear, repeatable way to measure, diagnose, and fix them for clients. This guide cuts through the noise. Here's what Core Web Vitals actually measure, what good scores look like today, and how to improve them—without needing a dedicated performance engineer on every project. What Core Web Vitals measure Google evaluates three user experience signals to determine whether a page feels fast, stable, and responsive: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for the biggest visible element on a page — usually a hero image or headline — to load. Google considers anything under 2.5 seconds good. Above 4 seconds is poor. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024. Where FID measures the delay before a user's first click is registered, INP tracks the full responsiveness of every interaction across the page session. A good INP score is under 200 milliseconds. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability — how much page elements unexpectedly move while content loads. A score below 0.1 is good. Higher scores signal that images, ads, or embeds are pushing content around after load, which frustrates users and tanks conversions. These three metrics are a subset of Google's broader Page Experience signals, which also include HTTPS, safe browsing, and mobile usability. Core Web Vitals are the ones you can most directly control and improve. Why your clients' scores may still be poor Core Web Vitals scores vary dramatically by platform, hosting, and how a site was built. Some of the most common culprits agencies encounter: Heavy above-the-fold content . A homepage with an autoplay video, a full-width image slider, and a chat widget loading simultaneously will fail LCP every time. The browser has to resolve all of those resources before it can paint the largest element. Unstable image dimensions . When an image loads without defined width and height attributes, the browser doesn't reserve space for it. It renders the surrounding text, then jumps it down when the image appears. That jump is CLS. Third-party scripts blocking the main thread . Analytics pixels, ad tags, and live chat tools run on the browser's main thread. When they stack up, every click and tap has to wait in line — driving INP scores up. A single slow third-party script can push an otherwise clean site into "needs improvement" territory. Too many web fonts . Each font family and weight is a separate network request. A page loading four font files before rendering any text will fail LCP, especially on mobile connections. Unoptimized images . JPEGs and PNGs served at full resolution, without compression or modern formats like WebP or AVIF, add unnecessary weight to every page load. How to measure them accurately There are two types of Core Web Vitals data you should be looking at for every client: Lab data comes from tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and WebPageTest. It simulates page loads in controlled conditions. Lab data is useful for diagnosing specific issues and testing fixes before you deploy them. Field data (also called Real User Monitoring, or RUM) comes from actual users visiting the site. Google collects this through the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) and surfaces it in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. Field data is what Google actually uses as a ranking signal — and it often looks worse than lab data because it reflects real-world device and connection variability. If your client's site has enough traffic, you'll see field data in Search Console under Core Web Vitals. This is your baseline. Lab data helps you understand why the scores are what they are. For clients with low traffic who don't have enough field data to appear in CrUX, you'll be working primarily with lab scores. Set that expectation early so clients understand that improvements may not immediately show up in Search Console. Practical fixes that move the needle Fix LCP: get the hero image loading first The single most effective LCP improvement is adding fetchpriority="high" to the hero image tag. This tells the browser to prioritize that resource over everything else. If you're using a background CSS image for the hero, switch it to anelement — background images aren't discoverable by the browser's preload scanner. Also check whether your hosting serves images through a CDN with caching. Edge delivery dramatically reduces the time-to-first-byte, which feeds directly into LCP. Fix CLS: define dimensions for every media element Every image, video, and ad slot on the page needs explicit width and height attributes in the HTML. If you're using responsive CSS, you can still define the aspect ratio with aspect-ratio in CSS while leaving the actual size fluid. The key is giving the browser enough information to reserve space before the asset loads. Avoid inserting content above existing content after page load. This is common with cookie banners, sticky headers that change height, and dynamically loaded ad units. If you need to show these, anchor them to fixed positions so they don't push content around. Fix INP: reduce what's competing for the main thread Audit third-party scripts and defer or remove anything that isn't essential. Tools like WebPageTest's waterfall view or Chrome DevTools Performance panel show you exactly which scripts are blocking the main thread and for how long. Load chat widgets, analytics, and ad tags asynchronously and after the page's critical path has resolved. For most clients, moving non-essential scripts to load after the DOMContentLoaded event is a meaningful INP improvement with no visible impact on the user experience. For websites with heavy JavaScript — particularly those built on frameworks with large client-side bundles — consider breaking up long tasks into smaller chunks using the browser's Scheduler API or simply splitting components so the main thread isn't locked for more than 50 milliseconds at a stretch. What platforms handle automatically One of the practical advantages of building on a platform optimized for performance is that many of these fixes are applied by default. Duda, for example, automatically serves WebP images, lazy loads below-the-fold content, minifies CSS, and uses efficient cache policies for static assets. As of May 2025, 82% of sites built on Duda pass all three Core Web Vitals metrics — the highest recorded pass rate among major website platforms. That baseline matters when you're managing dozens or hundreds of client sites. It means you're starting each project close to or at a passing score, rather than diagnosing and patching a broken foundation. How much do Core Web Vitals actually affect rankings? Honestly, they're a tiebreaker — not a primary signal. Google has been clear that content quality and relevance still dominate ranking decisions. A well-optimized site with thin, irrelevant content won't outrank a content-rich competitor just because its CLS is 0.05. What Core Web Vitals do affect is the user experience that supports those rankings. Pages with poor LCP scores have measurably higher bounce rates. Sites with high CLS lose users mid-session. Those behavioral signals — time on page, return visits, conversions — are things search engines can observe and incorporate. The practical argument for fixing Core Web Vitals isn't just "because Google said so." It's that faster, more stable pages convert better. Every second of LCP improvement can reduce bounce rates by 15–20% depending on the industry and device mix. For client sites that monetize through leads or eCommerce, that's a revenue argument, not just an SEO argument. A repeatable process for agencies Audit every new site before launch. Run PageSpeed Insights and record LCP, INP, and CLS scores for both mobile and desktop. Flag anything in the "needs improvement" or "poor" range before the client sees the live site. Check Search Console monthly for existing clients. The Core Web Vitals report surfaces issues as they appear in field data. Catching a regression early — before it compounds — is significantly easier than explaining a traffic drop after the fact. Document what you've improved. Clients rarely see Core Web Vitals scores on their own. A monthly one-page performance summary showing before/after scores builds credibility and makes your technical work visible. Prioritize mobile. Google uses mobile-first indexing, and field data shows that mobile CWV scores are almost always worse than desktop. If you only have time to optimize one version, do mobile first. Core Web Vitals aren't a one-time fix. Platforms change, new scripts get added, campaigns bring in new widgets. Build the audit into your workflow and treat it like any other ongoing deliverable, and you'll stay ahead of the issues before they affect your clients' rankings. Duda's platform is built with Core Web Vitals performance in mind. Explore how it handles image optimization, script management, and site speed automatically — so your team spends less time debugging and more time building.