Search Visibility is a metric which shows how visible a business is on search engines for keywords of interest.
How Is Search Visibility Calculated?
Search visibility is calculated by first gathering all the rankings of keywords. Then, for each ranking position, an estimated click-through-rate (CTR) is put in place.
After this, the total number of CTRs is combined and divided by the total number of keywords.
This produces a percentage score of 0% to 100%. A low percentage means that a website’s pages rank low in SERPs, while a high percentage means a website owns more rankings for keywords in SERPs.
Most sites score around 40% visibility.
Why Is Search Visibility Important?
Search visibility is important because it tells a website how prominent they are in SERPs.
Therefore, a low search visibility score can actually help a website determine where it is going wrong and how it can improve.
It is also a metric that can help a website compare its performance against competitors.
Additionally, a significant drop in this metric can be an indicator of a Google penalty (Penguin or Panda).
Why Might Your Search Visibility Drop?
It can be a stressful situation when you realise there is a drop in your search visibility. Below are some of the reasons your search visibility might have dropped.
Your competitor has taken their performance to the next level
Your site has encountered technical glitches in redesign (deleted pages, broken links, URL and HTML structure has been changed)
How Can You Improve Your Search Visibility?
There are a range of white hat SEO tactics that websites can use to improve their search visibility. Below are some of the key techniques:
1. Improve Your Content
It goes without saying that high-quality, relevant and reliable content leads to high search visibility.
By improving the quality of site content, page authority increases, and this leads to higher ranking, which means higher search visibility.
To do this, content must be fresh, have quality links, be optimised for target keywords, well researched and unique.
2. Label Keywords
When you add or remove keywords you will notice a change in your search visibility score. By labelling your keywords you can prevent this. Labelling will allow you to see visibility for a group/cluster of keywords.
3. Optimise Your Site For Local Search
Optimising your site for local search will help nearby customers discover you.
For this, optimise both your homepage and meta data with key information, keywords and phrases like where you are located and exactly what services you offer.
It is also important for you to create a Google ‘My Business’ page and build business citations.
4. Optimise Your Site For Mobile
Another essential for better search visibility is optimising your website for mobile. This will ensure that your website is accessible and readable to a mobile user, without slowing page speed or load time.
5. Add User-Generated Content
User-generated content comes in different forms, from product reviews and star ratings to photos and comments.
And, the stats show that most shoppers conduct online research before purchasing.
The more regularly your site/product is reviewed and commented upon, the higher it will appear in the ranking, meaning the higher search visibility.
Tools To Help You With Track Your Search Visibility
You can calculate/track your website’s search visibility as a whole using the tools below.
BrightLocal is an integrated SEO platform that has features and tools that can help you increase the visibility of your business on the internet and attract more customers.
This tool integrates all your SEO tools into a single platform. It gathers all the local SEO data you need, such as search rankings, organic traffic and maps as well as reports like on-site SEO, off-site SEO Google Local audit and competitor benchmark.
This platform also integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Google Analytics to show you how your business is doing in the social media space and what you can do to increase your business' traction on social media.
Nightwatch is a browser-based SEO tracker designed to help you monitor, analyze and improve the performance and visibility of your website in SERPs.
This tool helps you find the keywords you can use to increase rankings in your niche. Every day, the platform shows you new keyword opportunities that can help you position your company where your target audience can find what you have to offer.
Nightwatch’s backlink monitoring tool lets you track your backlinks and assess how strong your backlink profile is easily. The backlink dashboard shows you the number of backlinks you have, the pages they link to, and the quality of each backlink. This helps you recognize harmful backlinks, so you can improve your link-building strategy.
Nightwatch offers integrations with Google Search Console and Google Analytics so that you can optimize your search engine visibility. You can pull data from these platforms to get a comprehensive overview of insights.
SE Ranking is a cloud-based SEO platform that offers a wide array of tools that help marketers optimize a website and achieve a good positioning in SERPs. Originally created to gather ranking data for your keywords, it has expanded into a full-featured SEO suite.
With this tool, you can perform keyword research, track your keyword performance, spy on your competitors’ campaigns, check the quality of your backlinks, detect SEO problems on your website, generate new leads for your business, and monitor your traffic and visibility. In addition, you can use the social media management tool provided by the platform to maintain and improve your social media visibility.
If you encounter any problem using the tools, SE Ranking offers a vast resource center, which includes all the platform’s features and detailed instructions.
SEMRush is a full-featured marketing toolkit that helps SEO professionals carry out important marketing processes like keyword research, content optimization, content audits, advertising research, backlink research and competitor analysis, among others.
This tool makes it easy for you to measure how visible your business and content are on the internet. With it, you can see your traffic and the keywords you rank for compared to your competitors. You can also see the keywords you can compete for across different channels.
SEMRush offers more than 20 billion keywords, which makes it the largest keyword database on the market today. With this database, you can conduct keyword searches to help you build your SEO and PPC campaigns.
Some other visibility tools in this suite are on-page SEO checker, CPC map, backlink audit tool, organic traffic insights, and domain comparisons, among many others. There is also an SEO Writing Assistant feature that can help you optimize your content based on your Top 10 competitors on Google.
Other tools: Ahrefs
How Can We Help?
Is your search visibility score leaving much to be desired? Don’t see any way to boost it that you haven’t already tried? We can help you.
Contact us today and we’ll match you with a marketing team worth their salt. You might just have your best year yet.
You could also jump on over to our training courses filled with techniques and practises that we love and use.
