Search visibility is a term I use to help our customers understand that it’s not about 1 keyword or term that you should focus on to be at the top of the SERP. It’s about several and how well your current website performs. Moz explains below what search visibility is and how it’s calculated:
The Search Visibility score is the percentage of clicks we estimate you receive based on your organic rankings positions, across all of the keywords you’re tracking in your campaign. Search visibility is one of the first metrics you’ll see in your campaign Dashboard. – MOZ
It’s calculated by:
- Taking all of your rankings for all of your keywords.
- Applying an estimated click-through-rate (CTR) based on each ranking position. The CTR calculation ensures that higher ranking keywords are appropriately weighted in the score.
- Adding all of your CTRs and dividing by the number of keywords, giving you a single metric of 0-100%, to 2 decimal points.
Thus a Search Visibility score of 0% means you have no pages in the top 50. A score of 100% means you own all of the ranking positions for your keywords. Realistically, it is very rare for a site to score above the mid-40s for non-branded keywords. So let me share with you about the types of SERP features you can get ranked with to increase visibility.
- Featured Snippets
- Image Packs
- In-depth Articles
- Local Packs
- Local Teasers
- News Packs
- Reviews
- Site Links
- Videos
- AdWords Top & Bottom
- Knowledge Cards & Panels
- Related Questions
- Shopping Results
- Tweets
For the brevity of this post, let’s just focus on a few for now.
Featured Snippets
If you’ve ever Googled something that has a definition to it then you’ve seen these. Google UX Design and a featured snippet is one of the first results highlighted in a box with a link. While these are coveted by all. They are difficult to obtain unless your site is extremely credible. Therefore be excited that your results are below or on the same page as this.
Image Packs
Image search results are often ignored in business but shouldn’t be. Images that are optimized for the web can bring results to your business when searches are done on staff or a product. If products on your site are sold, naming the file and providing the correct markup on the webpage is key to getting that found in image results.
In-depth Articles
In-depth articles are results that are very broad in keyword terms. If you search for “brains” you could get a myriad of results from zombies to brain surgery. There are a lot of opinions about whether or not you should pursue these types of results. But at the end of the day, it really matters what industry you are in, and if you are getting found for those broad results.
5 reasons you shouldn’t be chasing Google’s In-depth articles
Local Packs
We’ve all seen these in the SERP to show us not only who but where. A map, contact info and more are included. Someone once called them the snack packs. But no cookies are here. That’s an Internet joke.
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Reviews
Review scores are an important signal for Search. A review signal is about 8.4% towards a ranking factor. Having a Google Business listing is now an absolute essential for local search. And is the smartest thing you can do to protect your brand and establish your local presence online. We have some horror stories about those that didn’t do this well.
Site Links
If you are all about ego-surfing, you’ve seen these guys under your websites listing on the search engine. These are site links, and no you have very little control of what appears here. Site links are beneficial to show organization of content and they change frequently based on traffic and interest. So don’t get stuck on what’s here. If there were a way to edit what appears her specifically, we would all be doing something very different with our time.
Videos
The best appearance in the search results are the videos. It’s like a little ad in the SERP and does lend to click thrus as its highly visible. There’s nothing better than having a relevant video about your business in the SERP. It’s like a commercial ad within the search engine.
We hope that this has been useful information about search and visibility.
