SEO Glossary / Search Visibility

Search Visibility

What is Search Visibility?

Search visibility is the estimated percentage of clicks a website gets from its organic rankings for one or more keywords. For example, if a keyword you rank for gets searched one hundred times, and you get five clicks, then your search visibility for that keyword is 5%.

How Can You Check and Track Search Visibility?

You can track search visibility for one keyword or multiple keywords.

For a Single Keyword

To check visibility for a single keyword, type the keyword into the Keywords Explorer and go to the Traffic Share by Domains report. The “Share” column tells you your estimated search visibility for that keyword.

For Multiple Keywords

To track search visibility for multiple keywords, you need to add them to a rank tracking tool like Ranktracker’s Rank Tracker. Here’s how:

  1. Set up a project.
  2. Click +Add keywords.
  3. Choose your country and language.
  4. Enter the keywords you want to track.
  5. Click “Add keywords.”
  6. Go to your Overview report.

This report shows that the search visibility for your tracked keywords is, for example, 3.11%. This means 3.11% of all clicks for your tracked keywords land on your website. Rank Tracker also tracks your search visibility trend, allowing you to see if your visibility is increasing or decreasing.

How is Search Visibility Calculated?

Search visibility may be calculated slightly differently in different tools, but here’s how it’s determined in Ranktracker:

  1. We pull the total number of clicks on search results for your tracked keywords.
  2. We look at how many of those clicks go to your website.
  3. We display the result as a percentage of all clicks.

Best Practices for Improving Search Visibility

Here are three ways to improve your search visibility:

1. Optimize for Search Intent

To optimize for search intent, understand the reason behind a search—in other words, what the searcher is looking for from a given query. Ensure your page aligns with search intent, as Google’s algorithm prioritizes results that match what people want to see.

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors. To build links, you can use the “Skyscraper Technique”:

  1. Find a similar but inferior page with lots of backlinks.
  2. Ask anyone linking to the inferior content to link to you instead.

Use Ranktracker’s Site Explorer to find pages linking to outdated or low-quality content and suggest your improved content as a replacement.

Internal links from one page on your website to another can improve the search visibility of the linked pages. Use Ranktracker’s Site Audit to find internal linking opportunities and enhance your site’s internal linking structure.

FAQs

Can I get 100% search visibility?

No, this is impossible because even if you rank in the top spot for every keyword you’re targeting, there will always be people who click on a different result in the SERPs (instead of yours or in addition to yours). This means your competitors’ pages will get some search visibility too.

What search visibility should I aim for?

As high as possible because higher search visibility means more traffic for your website, and therefore more leads and sales.