Visibility is the first metric you see in your Overview dashboard, and we dedicated an entire section to this metric. So it’s got to be important, right? Today you’ll learn what Visibility is, how it’s calculated at cPanel SEO, and how to use your Visibility score. To leave no stone unturned, we’ll also answer frequently asked questions.
What Is A Good Visibility Score?
How Can I Improve My Visibility Score?
Does Visibility Reflect Real Traffic Numbers?
What Is Visibility?
Visibility (also called Search (Engine) Visibility or SEO Visibility) is a popular SEO metric. It’s an index to measure and compare the SEO performance of domains. Put simply, it describes how well users can find a website in search engines.
As you might know, 75% of all users click on one of the top three organic search results (the classic blue links following ads). After that, the number of clicks shrinks rapidly with every following position.
Source: backlinko.com
There’s a reason SEO experts like to joke that Google’s page two is the best place to hide a dead body — only 0.78% of users even bother to look at the second page of search results.
So if you’re not on page one, your search result is literally invisible. The better your position on page one, the more visible your website is — and the higher your Visibility.
Your Visibility score does not reflect your Visibility for single rankings but for hundreds of thousands of keywords. So if you got great rankings for lots of popular keywords, your website is more visible in search results than if you had only a couple of page three rankings. That’s why platforms like Amazon and Wikipedia usually have a very high Visibility score.
How Is Visibility Calculated?
In cPanel SEO, a website’s Visibility score is calculated based on its rankings for 500.000 predefined keywords covering various industries, such as retail, travel, finance, insurance, education, health, and more.
Keyword KPI such as monthly search volume and Click-Through Rate are factored in, too.
What Is A Good Visibility Score?
In cPanel SEO, Visibility is an open-ended metric. There is no predefined good or bad score. Instead, compare it to your competitors’ Visibility scores and check where you stand compared to them. If your Visibility is higher than theirs—that’s a good score.
As a matter of fact, Visibility scores usually range differently depending on niches. So try to get a benchmark number for your niche. And then work to reach and improve it over time, so you become your niche’s leader.
How Do I Use Visibility?
Use your Visibility score as an indicator of your overall SEO performance, problems, and potential for optimization.
1. Get An Idea of Your Overall SEO Performance
You can track rankings for single keywords and know which position you rank on, and it’s an important thing to do. However, rank tracking does not give you a bird’s eye perspective of the overall improvement of your rankings—but Visibility does. When your SEO measures are effective and rankings improve, so does your Visibility score.
2. Diagnose SEO Problems
A sudden drop in your Visibility indicates problems in your SEO performance. Use Visibility like an alert. If it drops significantly, start digging as to what happened. Here’s a list of common reasons:
- Check out whether you were hit with a Google Penalty. Check Search Console for notifications. Make sure to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
- See if there are ramifications from a recent change in Google’s algorithm. Inquire about recent Google Updates and what they entail.
- Maybe your rankings dropped because your competitors optimized their website and content, and now they out-compete you. Compare their (historical) Visibility with yours. Use the Wayback Machine to compare how their content changed.
- You re-launched your site without SEO in mind. For example, check robots.txt and .htaccess for accidentally blocked pages, increased 404 status codes, faulty 301-redirects, and internal links.
- You changed your content in a way that didn’t help your rankings. Consider reversing the changes.
- Your website has technical issues. Run a Site Audit or check your Advisor for open technical tasks. Check your backend for outdated, recently updated, or incompatible plugins that may cause havoc.
- Maybe hosting issues are the cause. Inquire if your hoster made recent changes, has been hacked, moved their servers, or experienced technical difficulties. See if your server has issues.
Keep in mind that this list is not exhaustive. One or more of those reasons can apply simultaneously, or there may be other reasons altogether.
3. Competitor Comparison
Visibility is a great metric for a quick comparison of two or more websites. Check your Visibility against theirs. Who is out-competing who? Has a competitor outperformed you in the past, or vice versa? Who’s leading the field, and how big is the gap between you and your fiercest competitor? Answering those questions will help you develop an SEO strategy to come out (and stay) at the top of your niche.
4. Track Visibility Development Over Time With Historical Data
Want to know how a website fared over time? We provide historical data going all the way back to 2009 and free of seasonal fluctuations. That way, you can track and compare historic Visibility and see their development over long periods of time.
How Can I Improve My Visibility Score?
Short answer: Don’t make improving Visibility a goal in your SEO strategy.
Long answer: Visibility reflects the quality of your rankings in a single metric; it won’t lead to better rankings. Make it your goal to improve your rankings for relevant keywords that prospective customers actually use to find products and services like yours. Improving your rankings will improve your Visibility, too. But it’s your rankings that really matter.
As a rule of thumb, your Visibility score will be higher if:
- Your domain’s URLs rank in good positions
- You have a high number of indexed URLs with good rankings
- You rank well for keywords with a high search volume
To improve your rankings, follow these basic SEO measures:
- Conduct keyword research to identify promising keywords and create a keyword set.
- Track rankings for vital keywords and pages
- Create and optimize one page per keyword.
- Keyword-optimize every page
- Optimize your text and include relevant terms, questions, and more.
What Is Project Visibility?
Maybe you already stopped to think, “Wait, but I don’t care about my Visibility for keywords that have nothing to do with my business.” And you are right. While Visibility is a great score to get an idea of your overall performance and compare websites in general, it’s not tailored to your specific keyword set.
That’s why we provide Project Visibility. This metric is calculated the same way as Visibility. But instead of using 500,000 cross-industry keywords, Project Visibility is exclusively based on keywords in your Rank Tracker.
In other words, Project Visibility is a custom Visibility score for your unique set of keywords relevant to your business.
You’ll find Project Visibility here: Projects → Rank Tracker → Visibility.
As you might already know, you can also track your competitors’ rankings in your Rank Tracker. That way, you’ll get Project Visibility for them, too, allowing for a much more realistic comparison. So even if they have a slightly different product/service portfolio, Project Visibility accounts exclusively for keywords you actually share.
Does Visibility Reflect Real Traffic Numbers?
No. Visibility is not a traffic index. It is true that statistically speaking, position one gets 31.73% of all clicks, position two 24.71%, and so on. It is also true that position and Click-Through Rate are factored into your Visibility score. However, we base our calculation on statistics, not real-life traffic data.
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