Meeting your online business goals is dependent on visibility in search engine results. The viability of your business is at risk if prospective customers can not find you on the Internet. This is why SEO visibility is vital to your online business. This article explains what SEO visibility means and why it matters to your SEO efforts so much today. In addition, this article provides you with information to help you identify whether your website has a search visibility loss and helps you fix that problem.

What is SEO Visibility?

SEO visibility is the ability of your website to be found by search engines. Therefore, it can impact how well you do in major search engine results. Using this tool, users can increase the visibility of their websites in search engines via the “unpaid” search results. The more visible your site appears in these keyword searches, the better chance you will rank higher than other sites with similar content.

Search engine visibility helps you position your website to appear high in the rankings for the various search engines. In addition, you can use the SEO checklist of the search engine visibility tool to find optimization opportunities in your site’s content.

Are SEO visibility and SEO traffic the same?

They are completely different things. The reason they look similar is that we use them interchangeably quite often. However, as mentioned above, SEO visibility measures the actual number of clicks from SERPS, whereas SEO traffic means the total number of visitors coming through your website. So, yes, search engine visibility is a good indicator of where you stand in terms of SEO traffic, but don’t confuse it with the real thing.

Why Should You Bother about SEO Visibility?

Higher SEO visibility means your website owns all the organic spots in Google for a given single keyword and all the “clickable” SERP features. SEO visibility matters because it helps us understand how much we have left to improve our performance. If you are doing well regarding SEO visibility score, then the chances are that you already have some pretty solid optimization going on.

For website diagnosis

SEO visibility helps to understand what is going on in your website and how it affects the search engine rankings of your site. This tool will help you check for any issues with your web pages, links, or backlinks that could be affecting your ranking. Also, this tool can be used to identify which relevant keywords have a high search volume but low competition.

For a summary of SEO performance

If you have multiple pages/products/services on your site, having a single number that summarizes how well they perform will give you a better idea of their relative strengths and weaknesses.

For Opportunities

It’s easy to forget which relevant keywords you should be focusing on. The higher your search engine visibility, the easier it should be to find new keywords that bring in high volumes of visitors.

How is Search Visibility Calculated?

To measure search engine visibility, you need to know how much traffic comes from search engines. One of the best tools to use is Google Analytics. This tool allows you to track all the actual traffic coming to your website, and then you can segment the data based on keywords.

Search engine visibility is expressed as a percentage. This represents your impression share in the search results.

The formula takes into account:

  • The number of indexed pages found in search engines
  • How many times those pages are clicked on
  • Whether or not they appear at all on the first page of search results

You can see how many pages are ranking in the top 50 positions for your keywords. If you have no pages ranking, you have no page ranking for your relevant keywords. Relatively, when you have zero Search Visibility score, you’re not ranking on the top 50 results too. In contrast, a 100 Search Visibility score means you got your all list of keywords ranked. It’s rare to find non-branded keywords ranking above 40.

How to Know You Lost Search Visibility

A drop in search visibility comes from a variety of factors. Here are some possible causes:

You have fewer leads

Leads are the most vital part of any sales funnel. They are the gateway to conversion. The more leads you get, the higher conversion rates you’ll make.

If you are not technically savvy with your website setup, you may notice a drop in your website’s organic search traffic. You can commence, at this point, assessing your current SEO strategy and visibility to determine if there is anything wrong with your website or if you need to make some changes.

While certainly something to worry about if you did see a decrease in your SEO visibility, decreasing SEO leads alone might not be enough to know whether your SEO visibility got hit or not. The next step is checking the amount of traffic you’re receiving now vs. your usual SEO traffic numbers.

Your organic traffic numbers decreased

Google Analytics is the best tool to examine the impact of a potential loss of SEO visibility. GA can give you a general overview of how serious the situation is. For example, if your traffic seems to be dropping off, this may indicate that you’ve taken a hit in search engine visibility.

Now that you know something is going on and affecting your overall numbers, you should narrow down on an exact period that seems to affect your numbers. You may find that the timing of the hits is consistent. You then need to compare that period to another period when your numbers were normal. If the two numbers are similar, the drop was caused by a natural fluctuation in the market. If they differ significantly, you can conclude that there was a problem.

What Causes SEO Visibility Loss

Updates

Some things might happen after a website software or plugin update. For example, the same thing happens with Google and other search engines when they crawl your new piece of content. Therefore, it’s recommended to have at least one page per day updated so that if something goes wrong during an update, you will still be able to get back online quickly.

Website Is Not Mobile-friendly

Mobile is king these days. If your site is not optimized to receive mobile visitors, you are setting yourself up for failure. For example, your site may be missing features, or it may be slow to load. To find out, you can use Google Search Console (GSC) to check how mobile-friendly your site is. Just enter the URLs of pages that were affected when a mobile device visited them. If you see any issues, you will want to make changes to your website.

An Offline Server

The relation between SEO visibility loss and the offline server is very important for SEO. If the website has a bad performance, then the ranking factor score of the site will be affected. This happens when the website is slow or the server is overloaded.

Incorrect Canonical Tag

Canonical tags are used to tell search engines which page they should use when indexing a website. This indicates which page should be considered the “canonical” version of a given URL. If you don’t set up these tags correctly, Google may choose the wrong page for your site. This could result in lower rankings and fewer visitors.

The Redesign of the Site Isn’t Optimal

A website redesign is a process where all the elements of a website are changed. Its goal is to create a better user experience for visitors. However, if a website has been redesigned recently, then the chances are that it is not optimized for search engines. This means that it may be difficult for users to find the information they need.

Hosting Issues

Hosting issues can affect your website’s performance, resulting in lower search engine visibility and ranking. When slow loading times occur, you should check your web server settings, especially on a shared server. Also, if your site has been down for a long period, Google may penalize your site. This could result in lower rankings and fewer visitors.

Algorithm Updates

Algorithm and SEO visibility are relevant to each other. Algorithms are used to rank websites based on their relevance to search queries. This means that if your website is not visible on Google’s results page, it will not be ranked highly. On the other hand, if your site is not visible in Google, it will not receive any search engine traffic from Google users.

Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are snippets of text that appear at the top of search results for specific queries. They are generated from structured data markup such as Schema.org microdata. These snippets are usually displayed above the organic search results. Google has said that it uses these snippets to help users find what they want faster. However, Google also uses them to rank websites higher in search results.

What To Do When Search Visibility Drops

Google has been changing how search works for years. Recently, Google began its mobile-first campaign. That being said, if search visibility drops, then you need to optimize your website for mobile devices.

Is it safe to assume that a low Search Visibility means that my site was penalized?

Yes! If your Search Visibility drops below 50%, this could mean that your site has received some algorithmic penalty from Google. It also includes things like Penguin updates which may have impacted your search engine traffic but not your overall position within the SERPs.

Here’s what you can do when your online visibility drops:

Check Which Areas Have Been Hit by the Search Visibility Drops

Find tools that crawl and index all pages on your website so you’d know what actual content gets indexed. They also tell us how many times you crawled each page. This will give us an idea as to which pages get more hits than others.

If you want to see exactly where these pages rank for keywords, use Google Search Console. It’ll show you the keyword ranking based on monthly search volume.

Check Your Mobile Performance

Check your site performances on mobile devices. Depending on how mobile-friendly your site is overall, it’s likely that some of your SEO loss comes from mobile searches. You can check out how much of your Search engine traffic comes from mobile devices by going to GA’s Mobile tab.

What to Do to Keep Search Visibility High

Here are some tips that can help you keep your search visibility high.

Use Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are those with low competition but high demand. So even though your competitors might already own the phrase, you’re able to take advantage of the opportunity.

It would be best to always focus on phrases that aren’t yet owned by anyone else. That way, you won’t run into issues with trademark infringement. Also, keep in mind that while focusing on one particular phrase, you shouldn’t forget about related terms. Make sure that you include variations of the term.

Check Mobile-Friendliness

Make sure that your site looks great on mobile devices. You need to ensure that everything is easy to read and navigate through. Also, make sure that your images load quickly. Adding schema markup allows Google to understand your data better and display it correctly. Structured data gives you control over how information appears in search results, so you increase its relevance to search volume by providing the search intent.

Optimize Description and Title Tags

Description and title tags play a big role when it comes to driving targeted traffic to your website. The first thing potential viewers see before clicking any links is displayed at the top of the browser window. Unfortunately, many websites don’t take advantage of this element, leaving it empty. But if done well, description and title tags can help drive targeted traffic.

Your Backlinks Should Be from Relevant Sites

Backlinking is an important part of getting more organic clicks. When creating backlinks, think about where they come from. Do they link to relevant content? Are they coming from authoritative sources? These questions will help determine the success of your strategy.

Optimize Your Content

Content plays a huge role in determining how visible your page is. It’s no secret that having quality content leads to higher rankings. However, optimizing your blog content doesn’t just mean making sure it has keyword density. Think about the topic of your post. Is it interesting enough for users to warrant a higher click-through rate? Can visitors find answers to all of their questions right away?

People visit blogs and social media pages looking for specific topics. If your blog posts cover only general advice, then you’ll lose out on valuable clicks. Make sure your high-quality content is sharable so others can benefit from it too. Also, offer your unique take on a topic so to provide a fresh outlook about it. Each page must contain a unique value.

Improve Pages That Rank on Page 2

Only about1% of Google searches result in a user visiting the second page of the results. Therefore, an effective way to improve your search ranking is to make sure that your website appears higher in the list of search engine results. To do this, you must analyze the pages that appear on the second page of the Google query results. Then, you must improve those pages’ search engine optimization methods.

There Should Be Internally-Linked Pages

If you want to be better in the search engine visibility numbers, internal linking is a must. This is one of the relatively easy SEO techniques that can make a huge impact on your search engine ranking. Try finding pages on your site with lots of link authority. Then, you want to take advantage of internal links to move the link authority of those pages over to other pages that don’t have nearly as many links.

Audit Your Website for Its SEO performance

Technical SEO is a tricky yet important aspect of your search engine visibility, especially if you have great content and thousands of backlinks. But it’s impossible to inspect your HTML for issues and problems manually. So instead, it would help if you used SEO audit software that will find them for you.

Audit Your Website after an Update

Auditing the website ensures that the new version of the software does not introduce any bugs or security issues. It also helps us identify any problems with the website before they affect users.

Boost Your Meta Tag

Meta tags are used to describe web pages and help search engines understand what each page is about. The meta description is displayed near the title in search results. The meta description should be between 160 and 180 characters long and include keywords for search engine optimization.

In Conclusion

SEO Visibility is important as this is an indicator of how well your digital marketing strategy fared in the organics results. Do you need help in improving your online visibility? We can assist you in your online business. Contact us now!