SEO Visibility is a metric derived from multiple search-related factors, designed to assess how prominently a website appears in organic search engine results.
This metric, developed by Searchmetrics, serves as a universal index to measure and compare the online performance of various domains.
This KPI measures a website's visibility by aggregating data such as keyword search volume, ranking positions, and frequency. It evaluates how often and where URLs rank for these keywords in the organic search results of Google, Bing, and other search engines. Each rank position is weighted according to Searchmetrics' methodology. Additionally, dynamic Click-Through-Rate (CTR) models contribute to the calculation.
CTR indicates that top-ranked search results generally receive more clicks than those lower on the page. For instance, a video snippet at position five might attract more clicks than a plain text link at the same rank.
SEO Visibility increases if:
SEO Visibility indicates how visible a website is in organic search results on desktops. It helps identify optimization opportunities and analyze potential problems. It also allows for performance comparisons between domains, whether they are similar in theme or competitors. This can reveal trends or significant changes in search engine rankings, often triggered by algorithm updates.
SEO Visibility is recalculated weekly for all domains in the Research Cloud of the Searchmetrics Suite. Historical data can be used to track a domain’s performance over time. For instance, examining SEO Visibility trends for amazon.com from February 2017 to February 2019 can provide insights into performance shifts.
Historic analysis helps identify where significant changes in SEO Visibility have occurred, offering insights into technical changes, penalties, or the effects of updates like Panda or Penguin. This applies to both your own domain and others in the Searchmetrics database, across the US and internationally.
SEO Visibility reflects a domain's prominence based on keyword rankings, not actual traffic. Some webmasters misunderstand this when a domain's visibility changes without corresponding traffic fluctuations. It's not a traffic index but is based on a specific keyword set for comparison across domains. Although Searchmetrics uses the industry’s largest keyword set, it can't include every search query in its calculations.
Around 15% of daily Google queries are new, potentially generating traffic even if not factored into SEO Visibility calculations. Additional traffic can come from direct URL entries, external links, and paid ads like Google Ads. Organic search results are crucial but just one of several traffic sources. Searchmetrics offers Project SEO Visibility for more tailored keyword analysis.
While the general keyword set is dynamic, specialized websites face challenges:
Project SEO Visibility in the Searchmetrics Suite allows for customized analysis using a personal keyword set and search parameters, offering a more market-relevant visibility gauge. The focus should be on key terms vital to the web project, chosen by the user. Unlike general SEO Visibility, which relies on a broad, dynamic keyword set, Project SEO Visibility can exclude less relevant terms to better reflect domain performance.
With mobile search's growing importance, Searchmetrics developed Mobile SEO Visibility. Comparing Desktop and Mobile SEO Visibility helps assess a website’s performance across different devices. Consistent calculation methods ensure useful comparisons between these KPIs. For detailed Mobile SEO Visibility data, device-specific crawls can be conducted, revealing potential differences between mobile and desktop results.
Searchmetrics provides Local Mobile Visibility indexes for different cities, available in the Suite's Project Management Area. These indexes reveal a domain's visibility for mobile queries in specific locations, crucial for businesses with regional operations.
Paid Visibility measures domains using AdWords in Google search results. It considers factors like search volume, CPCs for advertised keywords, and visibility distribution across desktop and mobile search results.