Understanding and Improving Organic Search Visibility

An American songwriter and musician, Ezra Furman, said: “More visibility is more power, but more vulnerability.” This quote genuinely nails down the way robust search visibility affects businesses of all sizes.

Well, an organic search visibility score can make or break your entire online performance as it directly impacts your website traffic, conversions, sales, and user engagement. There is no reason to stretch the truth, a high-end SEO visibility empowers you to dominate search results and capture more prospects.

However, there is the other side of the coin — good search engine visibility also makes you more fragile, as you should constantly move mountains to maintain your rankings and continue outperforming tough online competition.

This article aims to clarify everything you need to know about website visibility, including its measurement, benefits, dropping reasons, and proven techniques for improvement. As a result, you will be fully prepared to boost your search performance and pave the way to online success.

What is Website SEO Visibility?

Simply put, SEO visibility or search visibility defines the percentage of users who witnessed your website in search engine results after entering a specific keyword in the search field. 

So, the search engine visibility score is meant to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO initiatives and understand whether your strategy is potent enough to beat your niche competitors.

Although this metric may seem too sophisticated, especially for beginners, search visibility is a simple SEO parameter. It helps you understand how easy it is for your target audience to find your pages when surfing Google or any other search engine.

Keep in mind that the higher the SEO visibility percentage, the more prospects will get acquainted with your website, which can lead to relevant traffic, increased conversions, and better business revenue.

How is Search Engine Visibility Calculated?

To derive an accurate SEO visibility score for a particular search engine, you should consider keyword rankings and search volume, click-through rate or CTR, search visibility trends, keyword relevance or importance to your specific niche, and other essential factors. 

In fact, well-regarded search engines like Google have no direct formula you can use to measure your website’s desktop and mobile visibility. Yet comprehensive data-backed SEO platforms and tools have innovative algorithms to help you gather the efficacy of your search performance.

For instance, SE Ranking’s Keyword Rank Tracker allows users to investigate search visibility score by analyzing the search queries of their choice and grading each keyword according to the position the website gets for this keyword in SERPs. Moreover, their tool also reckons the keyword search volume so that higher keyword volume increases the overall score.

The points for each keyword are then assessed within a unique formula that assembles the website’s search visibility score for a selected search engine:

Source: SE Ranking

In this formula, S is the SEO visibility, F defines the query’s search volume, and A stands for an altering ranking factor that depends on your website’s position in search for a particular keyword and its search volume.

What are the Perks of High Search Visibility?

High organic search visibility is only possible with a well-thought-out SEO strategy. Proper search engine optimization helps you comply with search regulations that Google and alternative search engines constantly adjust. Moreover, as the primary mission of any search engine is to provide users with relevant and up-to-date search results, winning SEO practices can help to suit your website to your target market’s search intent.

Thus, with SEO, you help search engines succeed with their mission and, in turn, get particular benefits that boost your business growth and development. For example, by maintaining a high search engine visibility score with wise SEO approaches, you obtain more relevant traffic to your pages and so can reach more people, better convert visitors into customers, and enhance the way users interact with your website.

Besides, SEO encourages you to accomplish your business goals with a user-centric website that is accessible, fast, secure, clean, and content-rich, ensuring a positive user experience and a seamless customer journey. And this certainly drives your competitive edge and makes your site trustworthy and credible for prospects and search engines.

How to Improve the Search Visibility of Your Website?

According to the recent Google Search Statistics, 5.6 billion searches are made on Google daily. It means that you lose tons of potential clients if you still are not working on your search visibility score. The following hints will help you tackle the problem and refine your SEO visibility.

Try New Keywords to Rank For

Testing new keywords is always a good idea when endeavoring to enhance a website’s SEO visibility. The thing is that user search intent is a flexible parameter that depends on niche trends and innovations and brings multiple unique keyword options that can be used to advance your rankings.

Furthermore, your competitors are working on their search visibility, too. Therefore, it is essential to analyze their SEO strategies and efforts and grasp valuable keyword ideas your website is missing. Conduct a SERP analysis to delve into your competitors’ SEO performance and understand gaps in your optimization strategy. Such a process can help you research competitors’ best practices, elevate your keyword research, consider the value you can add to the topics your niche opponents cover, and create a blueprint for your future content.

After the analysis, you can update existing website pages for more keywords. For instance, you can use long-tail keywords with a low or moderate search volume and low keyword difficulty. These lucrative keywords broaden your ranking potential and help you appear for more related user searches.

To illustrate, new sites related to pet care products should omit generic keywords like “dog food” or “healthy dog food”. These keywords require a high domain authority and a rich backlink profile to compete. Nevertheless, “healthy dog food for small dogs”, “healthy dog food for puppies”, “healthy dog food for picky eaters”, and other related suggestions can help to be more specific and increase the odds of appearing in more search engine results.

Source: SE Ranking

Another way is to create new website pages and sharpen them for particular target keywords. Here, you get a huge space to unwind as you can dedicate new pages to special product types and brands, mention specific product lines, or cover your industry topics that are on hype.

For example, a dog food company can opt for “vegan dog food”, “dehydrated raw dog food”, “wet dog food for sensitive stomach”, etc.

Refine Your Existing Keyword Rankings

Website pages that already appear on the first or second SERPs need your precise attention as they are your shortcut to higher rankings if optimized profoundly. Such pages can obtain better positions in search results faster because you need to tweak them instead of optimizing them from scratch.

For starters, reassess your content optimization. To do so, ensure your pages match the search intent and bring value to your prospects. Check the page structure, titles, and meta descriptions, and make sure there is no keyword stuffing. Your mission is to polish the page and its content to make it all readable, topic-oriented, and user-friendly.

Moreover, address technical errors like slow page loading, broken links, schema markup, lack of HTTPS protocol, issues with website sitemap and robots.txt file, and more. Such problems doubt your website’s reliability, interfere with normal indexing and crawling, and dramatically harm user experience.

Besides, double-check if your entire website is ready for mobile. The point is that Google prioritizes mobile indexing, and therefore, responsive website pages are more likely to achieve higher rankings in search results.

Source: Google Search Central

Last but not least, improve internal and external linking. Internal links help search engines understand the contextual relevance of your pages. They also improve website navigation, so users can find more helpful content related to the topic. What’s more, internal linking allows you to emphasize top pages to search engines, boosting their authority.

Meanwhile, external links, commonly known as backlinks, help to boost the credibility of your entire website to both users and search engines. They empower brand exposure and directly affect the site’s SEO visibility. The external links with relevant link juice make a rich backlink profile that boosts the authority of your domain.

Consider Google My Business and Local SEO

Indeed, not all businesses can take advantage of local citations and directories. However, if your company has a physical address and targets a specific area, local SEO and Google Business Profile are goldmines for your organic search visibility. 

Appearing for local searches is a lucrative opportunity to capture the most relevant prospects looking for products or services in the area you serve. To improve your SEO visibility with local search, consider creating a persuasive page on Google My Business, now known as Google Business Profile. 

It will help you to appear in Google Maps and showcase your company to people looking for goods nearby. Just make sure your business name, address, and phone mentioned on your Google Business Profile are equal to the ones specified on your website.

Source: Google SERPs

Also, run a comprehensive local SEO audit and identify valuable local keywords to target. Here, you should explore keyword ideas with geo-targeting, for example, “pet store in Wisconsin Dells”, “Chicago pet clinic”, etc. Additionally, consider creating local content that will help you drive users depending on the interests and demands of a particular location.

Thus, for example, you can write about a farmer’s market, a local community event, popular home repair equipment, healthcare tips, local cuisine, or any other topic related to your niche and area you target.

What Can Cause Your SEO Visibility Loss?

There are some essential reasons and signs why your search engine visibility is dropping. Heed them below.

Recent Update of Google Search Algorithm

Google’s algorithm is constantly improving its mechanisms of retrieving information. Therefore, if your website is affected by the latest update, you can see a significant drop in your search rankings and organic traffic. However, the algorithm update may cause an increase in your positions and traffic if you keep up with the best SEO practices and precisely monitor your site performance.

Technical Drawbacks on Your Website

Special initiatives like website redesign or site content and structure modifications can harshly affect site UX, which leads to a search visibility drop. For example, you may not correctly fix all bugs, so various broken links and distorted page layouts can interfere with normal site browsing. Moreover, problems with website architecture, security and accessibility matters, coding issues, and slow page load also impact SEO visibility.

Weak and Doubtful Web Hosting

Reliable and capable hosting creates a shield that helps your website load seamlessly with minimum server downtime. Poor web hosting services can slow down your website and affect its accessibility and security. Moreover, shared hosting providers often host spammy websites on their servers, which means you can share an IP with a gambling, clickbait, malware-infected webpage, or a site promoting adult content. It can affect your site’s reputation and harm your search engine visibility.

Loss of Featured Snippets

Obtaining a featured snippet for your page ranking for a certain keyword is a lucky break. If some of your pages have featured snippets, your content stands above all other search results, showing the summarized answer to user queries. Such a prominent display in SERPs collects clicks and impressions and is a huge and lucrative traffic gainer. Yet if your page loses a featured snippet due to an algorithm update, your competitor’s activity, etc., it will impact your website visibility in search engine results.

Decrease in the Number of Inbound Links

A major mission of off-page SEO is to assemble a relevant backlink profile containing links from authoritative websites to boost link equity and domain strengths. Backlinks help to grow a website’s reputation and credibility, so if you have noticed a significant drop in the number of backlinks featuring your website pages, a search visibility downturn won’t take long.

Footnotes

Your current search visibility score can say a lot about your SEO strategy. Business owners investing time and effort in website optimization and constantly monitoring their search performance have hardly any problems with search engine visibility. So, give your best shot to understand SEO visibility and focus on its improvement.