New brand KPIs: beyond SEO, inside the algorithm
There is a temperature that is starting to rise, and it’s not the weather, but the fever surrounding three words: brand, authority, and SEO.
SEO is no longer content to stay within the pages, but is creeping into places where no one wanted to look before: social media, videos, and creator chatter.
Google finally has it all
Ivano Di Biasi said it on stage at SEOZoom Day 2025, opening his speech with a clever provocation:
Those who know me are probably asking themselves right now: what is Ivano doing on stage with the word SOCIAL behind him?
And indeed, anyone who has followed his work in recent years knows how much Di Biasi has always focused on the more technical and algorithmic side of SEO, but today even he admits: the context has changed and to stay afloat, you need to look beyond.
We have been accustomed to a world where authority was demonstrated through links, technical optimization, a nice H1-H2 structure, and a couple of well-placed keywords, but we are sorry for the nostalgic: the future of online authority will not be so kind.
Today, the user journey is fragmented, multichannel, and difficult to capture with a single metric. The classic metrics are still useful, but no longer sufficient.
You need to understand what is happening around the brand: how many people search for it by name, who mentions it, how much it is associated with relevant content, and where it comes into play in digital conversations.
From 1998 to 2024: the long road to identity measurement
To understand where we are today, Di Biasi takes us on a journey spanning over 25 years.
It starts in Menlo Park in 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented an algorithm that not only searched for text, but also for authoritative websites.
At the time, the only way they had to measure authority was through backlinks. “They created the flawed backlink system,” says Di Biasi with the irony of someone who saw it come into being and grow.
Then something changed.
Google began collecting data, associating entities, and cataloguing everything.
And this is where a huge problem arose: Google knew who you were, but not how important you really were. It couldn’t understand whether a brand was important to people, whether it was searched for, whether it was talked about, whether it was alive.
The weak part of Google’s algorithm was precisely the social aspect. It had to try to understand this from web pages, but that wasn’t enough. It was all a mess.
The real watershed came in 2024.
Google finally installed the satellite dish and was able to pick up any signal from anywhere.
This meant that social media was no longer an external part of the web, but officially entered Google’s index.
It was scanned, indexed, ranked, and occupied up to 40% of a SERP, depending on the keyword.
Brand searches are one of the most important KPIs
Few things speak about your brand better than the brand itself, and one of the most underrated metrics is the volume of searches related to your business name.
If searches for your brand are growing year after year, it means you’re doing well. If they’re declining, something’s broken. And Google knows it.
Branded keywords have become an unmistakable sign of real authority and are one of the purest examples of navigational intent: the user knows exactly what they are looking for, already knows the brand, and wants to reach a specific destination.
The SEO value of these keywords is extremely high: not only do they attract users who are one step away from conversion, but they also help to dominate the SERP with controlled results.
But be careful: monitoring is not enough. You need to optimize. Does your homepage mention your brand in the title, H1, and body text? Have you taken care of reviews, social media profiles, and FAQ sections? If your social media pages outrank your website in SERPs, it’s not a mistake: it’s a sign. Google still doesn’t trust your domain.
Behind every brand keyword is an existing relationship, and your job is simple: strengthen it. Here’s how:
- Map all branded keywords
Build a complete inventory, going beyond the official name. Catch variants, abbreviations, common mistakes, and queries such as “support + brand.” You can use SEOZoom in the Keyword Research area. - Rank the queries
Divide keywords into three operational categories:
- Pre-purchase: users in the decision-making phase.
- Post-purchase: support, management, renewals.
- Side queries: old services, uncontrolled mentions.
- Decide where to intervene
Prioritize queries that bring value:
- Pre-purchase queries should be enhanced with targeted content.
- Post-purchase queries improve the experience and loyalty.
- Side queries should be monitored: monitor or ignore?
True authority is measured here, between the lines of the SERP. This is where you find out if your brand really sparks users’ interest. Or if it’s just a name among many others.
Off-site, no mercy
If you think that working on your brand means just taking care of your website or keywords, you’re way off track. Today, authority is also built off-site: between an Instagram carousel, a conversation on LinkedIn, or a video on TikTok.
Social media content is scanned, indexed, and ranked on Google. It drives traffic. And it provides real proof of engagement around a brand.
Ivano Di Biasi said it, but the data confirms it.
Authenticity, engagement, continuity: these are the signals that Google picks up when it looks at you outside your website. The fact that social content appears in SERPs is nothing new. But what is new today is that those social metrics help measure the perceived value of your brand.
Being multichannel is no longer an option. It’s the minimum requirement for being found wherever Google searches. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to respond better to a query, and often that response is social content.
That’s why how you speak also matters today. Google and AI engines reward clear, specific, and well-contextualized content. A reel on “how to use product X” can answer better than a thousand words. A gallery on “summer outfit ideas” can occupy the first visual space on the SERP. It doesn’t matter where you post: if you respond well, Google promotes you.
If someone searches for “summer 2025 wedding outfits,” Google already knows they don’t want a technical article. They want images, color palettes, trends. It knows what to look for. But it’s up to you and your brand to be found with the right answer, in the right format, and on the right channel.
And if you’re now wondering: how do you measure all this?
Ivano anticipated the answer with a “spoiler” that made many eyes light up in the room: the new version of SEOZoom integrates a section completely dedicated to social media. This is a turning point. Because it doesn’t just monitor traffic or organic site rankings: it cross-references SEO data with social metrics, monitors post engagement, profile performance, and traffic coming from Google to content published on platforms.
In practice, it helps measure new authority, the kind that is built in the minds of users even before it appears on web pages. With the new tools, you will be able to respond carefully to user requests, because SEOZoom can tell you whether a carousel works better than a reel for your specific strategy objective, or whether long or short captions are more popular.
Being able to regulate your brand’s temperature is no easy task: sometimes you risk getting burned by getting too close to trends you don’t know, or remaining frozen in the South Pole of “better safe than sorry.”
Through the “social trends” tool, for example, you can find out what topics are currently trending in your industry and use them to give opinions and create content that answers users’ questions.
Today, we work for SEO that is no longer satisfied with optimization. Now it observes, listens, and makes smarter decisions. And to do that, you need new tools that can see everything.
That’s where Search Everywhere Optimization comes in.
Brand fever like Saturday night fever
So, in conclusion, we need to implement a removal process:
- Forget linear funnels.
- Forget “neutral” SERPs.
- Forget the comfort zone of “certain” numbers.
There are things that are not SEO, but they do SEO: content, links, but also sentiment, conversations, branded search, social signals.
Today, it’s no longer enough to optimize your title. You need people to talk about you. You need them to interact with you. You need Google to understand that you really exist.
It’s the authority thermometer that rises when the brand warms up the audience, not just the algorithm.
And so, the question becomes:
how high is your brand’s temperature today?
