A branded search is a Google query that includes the name of your company, product or brand. It can be a simple search for your brand name ("Idea Grove," in the case of my agency) or a "brand-plus-keyword" query that combines a brand name with a generic keyword or phrase (such as, "Idea Grove PR agency").
Would you be surprised if I told you that 90 of the top 100 Google search queries in 2020 were branded searches? Led by "Facebook," "YouTube" and "Amazon," branded searches also account for 14 of the top 15 Google queries, with only the non-branded keyword "weather" breaking in at No. 6.
For every "restaurants near me" (ranked #69), there's a "dominos" (#64) and "pizza hut" (#73). And those branded searches deliver a strong trust signal to Google's algorithm. The more visitors a website gets from branded searches, the more SEO authority Google bestows on the brand.
Brand-plus-keyword searches may be even more powerful, because Google looks at searches that combine your brand name with keywords to assess the topics and industries in which you have the most authority. According to research by Backlinko, Google may give your website a rankings boost for that keyword as a result -- even when your brand name is not included in the search.