Week 22 – Visibility

It’s that time again, week 22 of the #atozofseo which brings us on to:

𝕍 for Visibility

SEOs use visibility as a way – almost a proxy – for the overall performance of a site and to track the progress of any ongoing SEO campaign.

Simply put, it’s a measure of how visible your site is in (usually) Google’s organic search results across either a REPRESENTATIVE group of keywords or a smaller list of TARGETED keywords, the theory being that as these go up your overall traffic will go up too. After all, to get the click you need to be visible, right?

The CAPS I used above are to highlight this isn’t for every keyword you might rank for. Third-party tools that measure this can’t possibly have every keyword in their own databases, so they use more popular keywords (& many millions of them). For instance, if you sell furniture, you may have visibility (within these tools) for ‘3 seater sofa’, but not for ‘3 seater sofa in orange with green wooden feet’.

So, the key with visibility is to look at yourself in conjunction with your main competitors. These tools are often very useful when it comes to big core algorithm changes. You’ll see studies of ‘winners & losers’ from these tool providers, plus you’ll also see horror stories of sites losing visibility when something goes wrong.

This is an excellent guide to “visibility” from SISTRIX a leading provider of a widely used visibility index. They have a free version too, check yourself out!

..and another from SearchMetrics, another very powerful tool.