SEO Visibility: How to fix a search – A Complete Guide
SEO Visibility is a metric compiled from several relevant search factors utilized to calculate how visible a website is in a search engine’s organic results.
What is SEO Visibility?
Searchmetrics have developed this metric to provide a single, universal index for measuring and comparing the online performance of different domains.
How is SEO Visibility calculated?
The calculation of this KPI, used to measure the visibility of a website, compiles several different data points, including information on the search volume of relevant keywords and the ranking positions and frequencies of a domain’s URLs. This indicates how often and where the URLs rank for these keywords in the organic search results of Google, Bing, and other search engines. Each position is given an individual weighting in line with the strategy developed by Searchmetrics. Additional data from dynamic models for calculating the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) also contributes to the calculation.
In this case, CTR means the following: For search results in general, the top rankings are hit on more than the search results at the bottom of the first results page or the following pages. At the same time, a search result displayed with a video snippet that ranks at, for example, position five will probably get more clicks than a simple text link at the same place.
As a guide, the SEO Visibility of a domain will be more important if:
- The domain’s URLs rank higher up the search results list
- Many different-different URLs on the domain are included in Google’s index with good rankings
- The domain’s URLs rank well for keywords with a huge search volume
What does SEO Visibility tell us?
Generally speaking, SEO Visibility shows how visible a website is in the organic search results when queries are entered into search engines on desktop computers. It is an index that also makes it possible to analyze problems and identify the potential for optimization.
Furthermore, it is possible to compare various domains in terms of their performance on search engines – e.g., thematically similar pages or competitors. It is also possible to compare winner and loser domains to conclude general trends or significant changes in search engine rankings. These often occur following algorithm updates.
Historic SEO Visibility
The SEO Visibility is constantly re-evaluated and recalculated and is updated weekly for all domains in the Research Cloud of the Searchmetrics Suite. In addition, of course, past data points can be used to analyze the trend of a domain’s search engine performance over time.
The use of historic SEO Visibility performs it possible to analyze a domain’s progression over several years, depending on how old the domain is. With this historical analysis, it is possible to recognize where the significant changes in SEO Visibility have occurred. This can also be used to understand better technical changes (domain migrations, errors), penalties, or the impact of Google updates like Panda or Penguin. And this does not just apply to your domain, but all domains in the Searchmetrics database – in the US and internationally for specific country indexes.
Why doesn’t SEO Visibility show real traffic numbers?
SEO Visibility shows how visible a domain is based on the entire buy valium online legally keyword set that rankings are analyzed for. The most common criticism received from web admins when a domain’s SEO Visibility goes up or down is that traffic and conversions may have stayed the same. This criticism is based on a simple misunderstanding: SEO Visibility is not a traffic index!
Searchmetrics’ visibility is calculated based on a particular keyword set and not based on real-life traffic data. We use a vast keyword set to create an everyday basis for comparison nationally and internationally. Even though Searchmetrics uses the most extensive keyword set of all companies in the industry as the basis for its data calculation, it is, of course, impossible to include each single search query in the SEO Visibility calculation.
Special website focus
Although the broad keyword set is dynamic and constantly expanded, there are two further challenges:
- The more specialized a website is, the more likely it is that the SEO Visibility won’t consider the entire performance of the page because longtail keywords that help generate relevant traffic are not included in the analyzed keyword set.
- Also, keyword rankings that may be irrelevant to the website’s actual traffic can impact SEO Visibility. If, for example, a domain ranks low down for keywords that are not particularly relevant for that domain, then the SEO Visibility may be lower than the actual traffic levels would suggest.
Project SEO Visibility
The Project SEO Visibility can be used in the Project Management Area of the Searchmetrics Suite to set up a customized analysis based on a unique keyword set and any desired combination of different search engines and search parameters (mobile, local, etc.). This creates a more relevant gauge of visibility for your market simply because it is a more specific analysis. Therefore, the data defined as the basis for Project SEO Visibility should focus on the keywords that are considered most important in that particular web project, which the user can decide upon.
Reminder: As opposed to Project SEO Visibility, the general SEO Visibility is based on a broad, dynamic, growing keyword set. This can potentially include keyword rankings that are relatively unimportant for a particular domain, which can negatively impact the calculation of its performance. Therefore, such terms should be excluded from the keyword set defined for the Project SEO Visibility.
Mobile SEO Visibility
In line with the growing importance of search queries from mobile devices, Searchmetrics has developed a mobile-specific KPI, Mobile SEO Visibility. Looking at Desktop and Mobile SEO Visibility together makes it possible to compare a website’s performance for search queries coming from desktop computers with those from mobile devices.
A quick look at the SEO Visibility graph makes it easy to compare the differences in visibility between mobile and desktop directly. We use the same machine learning algorithms from Desktop SEO Visibility to apply our dynamic CTR calculation to mobile to maintain comparability. We think it is invaluable to have a standard calculation basis to be able to provide a helpful comparison between these two KPIs.
