This is a brief explanation of what we mean by “visibility” in our SEO reports.
“Visibility” is an SEO metric for historically comparable data analysis
Visibility is a calculated metric. Visibility takes into account how often the website appears in search results overall. Every week, millions of search queries are checked to see whether the company’s own website was found.
If a website appears on the first page of search results for many different keywords, it has higher visibility than a website that appears on the first page for only a few keywords.
The key figure is not standardized. Each SEO tool calculates slightly differently. And the elaborate databases of search terms can be different in scope and quality. Therefore, visibilities cannot be compared across software.
These results are particularly valuable for making standardized comparisons between several websites or between different time periods .
Difference of ranking and visibility
Ranking refers to the position of a website in the search results for certain search queries(self-defined keywords),
Visibility takes into account the overall presence of a website in search results(huge general keywords/search results database).
Both factors are important for a successful SEO strategy.
How does our SEO tool measure visibility?
Measurement method
From a list of approximately 1 million representative keywords per target country, a weekly check is carried out to determine whether and how a website ranks in the search results for the respective keyword.
The finds are then 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 algorithm is different from SEO software to SEO software, because each program has slightly different criteria.
But within a system/software the procedure is useful to document noticeable changes.
Advantages
- 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 see search trends and also surprises from unexpected searches, with potential for more offers on the site. 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).