SEO: “Visibility” vs. “Ranking”

“Visibility” is an SEO metric for historically comparable “neutral” search engine rankings.

Visibility is a calculated metric. Visibility takes into account how often the website appears in the search results if you regularly search the web using a search engine with a huge database of collected searches.

Measuring principle

Specialized statistics tools continuously collect millions of real, representative search queries of all kinds in their own databases.

Every week, search queries are launched with all keywords and checked to see whether and how prominently the searched website appears in the search results. If a website appears on the first page of search results for many different search terms, it has a higher visibility than a website that only appears on the first page for a few search terms.

Statistical tools use specially developed evaluation formulas for this, which is how ours compares: The findings are weighted according to search frequency and position: because a change from position 3 to 1 is much more relevant than from position 43 to 41 (ranking improvements on the first two search pages are much more difficult to achieve). And a keyword that is rarely searched for in Germany is not as important as one that is used many times.

The idea behind this approach is to objectify a comparison over time and to competitor sites.

Notes

• The larger these databases are and the more national languages they include, the better the evaluations – and the more expensive the software is to use! – Smaller databases are sufficient for normal comparisons, but for very special products or rarer country searches, a much more extensive data material is required.
• The key figure is not standardized. Each SEO tool calculates slightly differently. And the elaborately collected databases of search terms can vary in scope and quality. Visibilities can therefore not be compared across software.
• These results are particularly valuable for making standardized comparisons between several websites or between different time periods .
• After appropriate weighting, the result is a solid comparative figure that can be tracked over time. The measurement is neutral and independent of statistics programs such as Google Analytics and is therefore even possible far into the past.
• You can therefore even apply this measurement to competitor sites, and compare these numbers to your own.
• It is also interesting to see a correlation between a ranking change (measured by the statistics program) and a change in “visibility”: we pay particular attention to strong changes, and we then want to know if something relevant happened during the week, or if a visibility change is just related to a minor keyword.
• In addition, here we get an overview of thousands of actual keywords for which the page was found. You can recognize search trends and also surprises through unexpected searches, with potential for further offers on the website. This keyword list is one of the data sources for our keyword research. We determined for us important keywords, which then in a further step future individually measure (ranking control).