What is search visibility?
Why search visibility of a site matters in SEO?
What are the factors affecting the search visibility of your page?
How to calculate search visibility of your page?
How to improve search engine visibility of your page/website?
Search visibility or SEO visibility is the share of traffic website gets from its ranking in the organic search results. It is measured in the form of percentage of clicks a website gets from its organic rankings for one or more keywords. For instance, if the keyword you rank for gets searched one hundred times and you get six clicks, then your search visibility for that particular keyword is 6%.Thus, search visibility can be regarded as the main purpose for search engine optimization.
It is important to know that search visibility is not same as SEO traffic. SEO visibility is a relative value measured as a percentage of total clicks received for a keyword, while SEO traffic is an absolute value measured in terms of total number of clicks received for a specific keyword. When there is loss of SEO visibility, it also affects the SEO traffic, but the opposite is not true.
There is different formula used by different tools/platforms to calculate search engine visibility. However, there are some key factors that are considered by most platforms/ tools to evaluate the search engine visibility of a website. Here are the common factors that affect the search visibility of a website:
1. Ranking
Ranking represent the position of your website on search engine results for a specific keyword. Higher rankings typically lead to higher search visibility. ESL Ranks Pro Rank Tracker shows the keyword position on the website on google search results (1 to 100)
The site overview tool, also shows the graphical position of all the competitive keywords of your website ranking from 1 to 100 in the google search results
2. Search Volume
Search volume is the average number of monthly searches for the target keyword. High volume keyword usually contributes to more search engine visibility as they reflect potentially greater traffic.
3. Competition
It calculates the difficulty for your chosen keywords based on various factors such as the number of competing websites, SEO strength etc., They provide you with relative visibility score compared to your competitors.
4. Click-through rate (CTR)
It estimates the likelihood of users clicking on your search result based on factors like title, meta description, and ranking position.
5. User Engagement Metrics
It shows the metrics based on how users engage with your site. These can include factors like bounce rate, average time on page, and conversions.
6. SERP Features
SERP features like rich snippets, knowledge panels and other such features also have significant impact upon increasing the visibility of a website. It is also important to keep in mind that focusing solely on SEV metrics without considering overall traffic and conversions can be misleading.
7. Google Algorithm Changes
When your search visibility is dropped due to updates in Google algorithm, you can’t control it. These updates can sometimes boost your visibility as well. If your website has witnessed sudden decrease after Google update, it is good to seek help from an SEO expert to take necessary actions to improve your site’s ranking.
8. Keyword Trends
People nowadays search differently than decades ago. As users nowadays are savvier about finding what they need, their keyword selections also accordingly. So, while a specific keyword may have tons of search volume today, it may not remain same tomorrow.
Here,
S is the search engine visibility;
F is the search volume;
A is the adjusting factor
The adjusting factor is determined on the basis of keyword position your website gets in a search engine based on a certain search volume:
Top 3 positions: A=1;
4th position: A=0,85;
5th position: A=0,60;
6, 7 positions: A=0,50;
8, 9 positions: A=0,30;
10th position: A=0,2;
And so on: A=0.
For instance, if you start keyword research and find a keyword with 10k searches per month, it may sound like a competitive keyword that should be targeted. However, a lot of these keywords have super high keyword difficulty score making it difficult to beat the competition. On the other hand, long tail keywords usually have low keyword difficulty score and low competition in search engine result pages. Thus, it is recommended to consider them to create a solid SEO strategy.
2. Make sure your website is mobile friendly and is optimized for core web vitals
Google has also rolled out a mobile friendly update focused on boosting the ranking of mobile friendly pages on mobile search results. Fortunately, it is easy to check if google finds your site mobile friendly or not. For this, you can use Google’s own tool, search console to know if your site has any mobile-related issues.
Core web vital is another important element to consider for improving your click through rates and rankings. Google core web vitals are a set of key performance indicators significantly affecting the ranking of a website. They are page experience signals evaluating your website experience. These metrics specifically consider the loading, interactivity and visual stability of a website. You can use ESL Ranks Pro site audit tool to measure the core web vitals of a website. As Google is stressing a lot on providing a great user experience to rank higher, it is essential to work on factors like core web vitals and mobile friendliness of a website.
3. Improve Your title and meta description tags
The organic click through rate is one of the major Google ranking signals. It means the higher is your click through rate, the higher will be chances of your site to rank on search result pages. As per therecent Google click through rate industry study by backlinko, the third result in Google gets 18.6% of all clicks. But the question is how to improve click through rate of a website
One of the most impactful ways to increase click through rate is writing title tags and meta descriptions that make your result more compelling.Specifically, you want to write attention grabbing title tags and meta descriptions. Learn more about how to write and optimize catchy title tags and meta description tags
4. Build a strong backlink profile
If you want to increase search visibility of your site, you must build a strong backlink profile. But not just any backlink will help you reach your aim. In fact, some of them can put your website intro trouble such as spammy links. You need to focus on getting links from the websites in your niche. Learn here how to strengthen your backlink profile using tried and tested tactics.
5. Optimize your content for dwell time
Google wants to rank pages that are valuable to the people. Dwell time is one of the many UX factors that Google uses to understand if the site is a good match for the specific keyword. The website with high dwell time often has higher rankings than sites with low dwell times.
Dwell time is how much time people spend on your site. For instance, if someone clicks on your site and go back to google within 3 seconds, it means the dwell time of your site is very low. And if more people bounce that quickly, it will indicate Google that your site is not giving people what they are looking for on your site. On the contrary, if people spend 3 minutes on your site, it says that people are finding your site valuable and interesting and it is a good match for the keyword they are searching for.
How to improve dwell time?
For increasing the dwell time on your site, it is recommended to work on your above the fold area in your site and make it super compelling as it is often the first thing noticed by your web visitors. Here are some most effective tips to improve your dwell time
To find LSI keywords, you can also use the Google Keyword planner. Keep in mind, you should have a Google AdWords account to use the Keyword Planner.
8. Establish internal link between pages
The internal link connects one page of your site to another in a meaningful way and have a positive impact on the users and the search engines.
Internal linking is an SEO technique that can make a huge impact on your search engine rankings. Find the pages on your site with high link authority. You can use ESL Ranks Pro to find the indexed pages on your site
Then, you need to use internal links to push the link authority of those pages to other pages that don’t have many links. Make sure not to overload your page with internal links.
9. Run a website audit
Technical SEO of your website is important to ensure it is providing a great experience to both the users and the search engines. If the search engine bots are not able to crawl or index your site, it will be really difficult to rank it. Even if your website has awesome content and thousands of backlinks, they won’t fetch ranking for you if google is not able to crawl and index it. Thus, it is essential to conduct regular site audit using a reliable site audit tool as it is not feasible to do it manually. ESL Ranks Pro is one such reliable tool to spot the technical issues in your website.
10. Increase your domain authority
One of the challenging tasks in SEO is to convince someone to link to your site. Luckily, you can improve the search engine visibility even without getting backlinks that are pointing to hose pages. You can do this by improving domain authority of the page,
What is search visibility?
Search visibility or SEO visibility is the share of traffic website gets from its ranking in the organic search results. It is measured in the form of percentage of clicks a website gets from its organic rankings for one or more keywords. For instance, if the keyword you rank for gets searched one hundred times and you get six clicks, then your search visibility for that particular keyword is 6%.Thus, search visibility can be regarded as the main purpose for search engine optimization.
It is important to know that search visibility is not same as SEO traffic. SEO visibility is a relative value measured as a percentage of total clicks received for a keyword, while SEO traffic is an absolute value measured in terms of total number of clicks received for a specific keyword. When there is loss of SEO visibility, it also affects the SEO traffic, but the opposite is not true.
Why search visibility of a site matters in SEO?
Search visibility is a key metric for the SEO success. It tells you how often your site appears on Google search results. The higher the search visibility, the more your site will appear on search engine results and ultimately higher will be the chances of searchers turning into customers. Your search visibility is actually important for your business to do well both online and offline. Let’s understand the importance of increasing search visibility of your business with the help of following stats- More than 90% of consumers search online before making a purchase either online or in-store.
- 75% of searchers never move on to the second page of search results.
- Organic search contributes up to 53% of the total traffic of a business.
- 61% of businesses say improving SEO and their organic presence is their number one marketing priority.
What are the factors affecting the search visibility of your page?
Search engine visibility score is calculated on the basis of the position of the ranking keywords and average search volume. You can use our tool ESL Ranks Pro to calculate the search visibility of your page.
There is different formula used by different tools/platforms to calculate search engine visibility. However, there are some key factors that are considered by most platforms/ tools to evaluate the search engine visibility of a website. Here are the common factors that affect the search visibility of a website:
1. Ranking
Ranking represent the position of your website on search engine results for a specific keyword. Higher rankings typically lead to higher search visibility. ESL Ranks Pro Rank Tracker shows the keyword position on the website on google search results (1 to 100)
The site overview tool, also shows the graphical position of all the competitive keywords of your website ranking from 1 to 100 in the google search results
2. Search Volume
Search volume is the average number of monthly searches for the target keyword. High volume keyword usually contributes to more search engine visibility as they reflect potentially greater traffic.
3. Competition
It calculates the difficulty for your chosen keywords based on various factors such as the number of competing websites, SEO strength etc., They provide you with relative visibility score compared to your competitors.
4. Click-through rate (CTR)
It estimates the likelihood of users clicking on your search result based on factors like title, meta description, and ranking position.
5. User Engagement Metrics
It shows the metrics based on how users engage with your site. These can include factors like bounce rate, average time on page, and conversions.
6. SERP Features
SERP features like rich snippets, knowledge panels and other such features also have significant impact upon increasing the visibility of a website. It is also important to keep in mind that focusing solely on SEV metrics without considering overall traffic and conversions can be misleading.
7. Google Algorithm Changes
When your search visibility is dropped due to updates in Google algorithm, you can’t control it. These updates can sometimes boost your visibility as well. If your website has witnessed sudden decrease after Google update, it is good to seek help from an SEO expert to take necessary actions to improve your site’s ranking.
8. Keyword Trends
People nowadays search differently than decades ago. As users nowadays are savvier about finding what they need, their keyword selections also accordingly. So, while a specific keyword may have tons of search volume today, it may not remain same tomorrow.
How to calculate search visibility for specific keywords?
Method 1: One of the easiest ways to calculate search visibility is multiplying your rank for a keyword with its average monthly search volume (e.g., Rank 6 x 1000 searches/month = 6000). Higher scores indicate potentially higher visibility. Method 2: With ESL Ranks Pro, you can check your search visibility for search engines like Google and Bing. The simple rule is followed in the calculation. The higher the ranking, the more will the search visibility score. Apart from it, the ESL Ranks Pro also provide the keywords search volume. For calculating search visibility, the points are awarded to each keyword and inserted into a specific formula given below that helps to calculate the site’s current visibility on Google (or Bing). Here’s what the formula looks like:
Here,
S is the search engine visibility;
F is the search volume;
A is the adjusting factor
The adjusting factor is determined on the basis of keyword position your website gets in a search engine based on a certain search volume:
Top 3 positions: A=1;
4th position: A=0,85;
5th position: A=0,60;
6, 7 positions: A=0,50;
8, 9 positions: A=0,30;
10th position: A=0,2;
And so on: A=0.
How to improve search engine visibility of your page/website?
There are many factors that influence search visibility, including the content quality, the relevance of your keywords, and the strength of your backlink profile. Improving your search visibility is quite a challenging task, but it is worth if you want to improve your site’s rankings on search engine result pages.10 effective ways to increase your search visibility
1. Consider long tail keywords in your SEO strategy If your website is not gaining visibility you wished for, one of the reasons maybe you are targeting keywords that are too competitive to rank for. When you are a beginner and start keyword research, you are typically tempted to start with competitive keywords as they have high search volume.
For instance, if you start keyword research and find a keyword with 10k searches per month, it may sound like a competitive keyword that should be targeted. However, a lot of these keywords have super high keyword difficulty score making it difficult to beat the competition. On the other hand, long tail keywords usually have low keyword difficulty score and low competition in search engine result pages. Thus, it is recommended to consider them to create a solid SEO strategy.
2. Make sure your website is mobile friendly and is optimized for core web vitals
Google has also rolled out a mobile friendly update focused on boosting the ranking of mobile friendly pages on mobile search results. Fortunately, it is easy to check if google finds your site mobile friendly or not. For this, you can use Google’s own tool, search console to know if your site has any mobile-related issues.
Core web vital is another important element to consider for improving your click through rates and rankings. Google core web vitals are a set of key performance indicators significantly affecting the ranking of a website. They are page experience signals evaluating your website experience. These metrics specifically consider the loading, interactivity and visual stability of a website. You can use ESL Ranks Pro site audit tool to measure the core web vitals of a website. As Google is stressing a lot on providing a great user experience to rank higher, it is essential to work on factors like core web vitals and mobile friendliness of a website.
3. Improve Your title and meta description tags
The organic click through rate is one of the major Google ranking signals. It means the higher is your click through rate, the higher will be chances of your site to rank on search result pages. As per therecent Google click through rate industry study by backlinko, the third result in Google gets 18.6% of all clicks. But the question is how to improve click through rate of a website
One of the most impactful ways to increase click through rate is writing title tags and meta descriptions that make your result more compelling.Specifically, you want to write attention grabbing title tags and meta descriptions. Learn more about how to write and optimize catchy title tags and meta description tags
4. Build a strong backlink profile
If you want to increase search visibility of your site, you must build a strong backlink profile. But not just any backlink will help you reach your aim. In fact, some of them can put your website intro trouble such as spammy links. You need to focus on getting links from the websites in your niche. Learn here how to strengthen your backlink profile using tried and tested tactics.
5. Optimize your content for dwell time
Google wants to rank pages that are valuable to the people. Dwell time is one of the many UX factors that Google uses to understand if the site is a good match for the specific keyword. The website with high dwell time often has higher rankings than sites with low dwell times.
Dwell time is how much time people spend on your site. For instance, if someone clicks on your site and go back to google within 3 seconds, it means the dwell time of your site is very low. And if more people bounce that quickly, it will indicate Google that your site is not giving people what they are looking for on your site. On the contrary, if people spend 3 minutes on your site, it says that people are finding your site valuable and interesting and it is a good match for the keyword they are searching for.
How to improve dwell time?
For increasing the dwell time on your site, it is recommended to work on your above the fold area in your site and make it super compelling as it is often the first thing noticed by your web visitors. Here are some most effective tips to improve your dwell time
- Write catchy introductions
- Organize content into sections and subsections to improve readability
- Match the content with search intent
- Create useful, insightful and valuable content
- Enable comments to encourage discussion and allow visitor’s to read other people’s comments
- Create interactive content like calculators, polls and downloadable products
To find LSI keywords, you can also use the Google Keyword planner. Keep in mind, you should have a Google AdWords account to use the Keyword Planner.
8. Establish internal link between pages
The internal link connects one page of your site to another in a meaningful way and have a positive impact on the users and the search engines.
Internal linking is an SEO technique that can make a huge impact on your search engine rankings. Find the pages on your site with high link authority. You can use ESL Ranks Pro to find the indexed pages on your site
Then, you need to use internal links to push the link authority of those pages to other pages that don’t have many links. Make sure not to overload your page with internal links.
9. Run a website audit
Technical SEO of your website is important to ensure it is providing a great experience to both the users and the search engines. If the search engine bots are not able to crawl or index your site, it will be really difficult to rank it. Even if your website has awesome content and thousands of backlinks, they won’t fetch ranking for you if google is not able to crawl and index it. Thus, it is essential to conduct regular site audit using a reliable site audit tool as it is not feasible to do it manually. ESL Ranks Pro is one such reliable tool to spot the technical issues in your website.
10. Increase your domain authority
One of the challenging tasks in SEO is to convince someone to link to your site. Luckily, you can improve the search engine visibility even without getting backlinks that are pointing to hose pages. You can do this by improving domain authority of the page,
- You can check your domain rank, referring domains and backlinks using ESL Ranks Pro’s backlink checker.
- Just feed your home page in the tool and it will provide data to evaluate the link profile of a site or page URL
- Identify content gap in your site and create new pages. If you want to rank for new keywords, you need to identify content gaps in your site for those keywords and fill the gap with the new content. By conducting competitive research using the site audit tool, you can find relevant keywords that you and your competitors are not targeting. From there create a high-quality content to match the user’s intent. It will help you to rank for newer keywords as well as enhance the overall user experience of your website.
