You know about SEO. But what about SEO visibility — is that the same thing? Not quite, but there’s certainly overlap. 

Let’s look into SEO visibility, why it matters, and how to improve your site’s score. 

Organic SEO

SEO visibility is organic search visibility — how likely a person is to see your site in search engine results and click on it. The more relevant keywords you target and rank for, the higher your SEO visibility score. 

Monitoring your SEO visibility score and tracking whether it’s increasing or decreasing can help you determine whether your on-page, off-page, and technical SEO efforts are working. These determinations can help you optimize spend, improve time management, and increase client acquisition and retention. Watching your score’s trend provides useful and tangible information regarding where to put additional effort into improving your ranking positions.    

Q: Is SEO visibility the same as organic traffic? Sure isn’t! Even if your traffic is increasing, visibility might not be. This is because your SEO visibility score doesn’t include paid traffic from paid-per-click ads (like Google ads) or direct URL entries. Instead, it only looks at organic search for tracked keywords.

Find Your Visibility Score

Rather than looking for a “good” or “bad” score, you’re looking for a pattern. Is your score going up? Great, the SEO campaign efforts you’re making are paying off. If your score is decreasing, it’s time to look at what’s happening. 

You can find your visibility score using a tool like Google Search Console or Semrush. Online SEO tools take different approaches to calculating SEO visibility, so your score won’t be the same from one to another, but they follow the same general approach. Don’t worry too much about this — you’re looking for a pattern, not an exact number. 

Generally speaking, the more target keywords you go after and the higher you rank for those terms, the higher your search visibility will be. The more people who see your site and click through (estimated click-through rates) to it during their search, the higher your score will be. 

Since your score shows your domain’s historic and current visibility in organic search results, it’s good to monitor it continuously. Watching it change will help you understand how to keep improving your performance and how you compare to sites similar to yours. 

Factors Influencing Visibility

SEO visibility scores are calculated with algorithms that use factors for search engine rankings like: 

• User experience 
• Content quality
• Number of quality backlinks 

This means what you put on your site and how useful it is to readers (and other sites talking about related concepts and linking back to you) matters. Factors like this directly impact where you show up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

If your domain’s URL is higher in the SERPs, your visibility score will be higher. If a bunch of your pages’ URLs have good rankings, that’ll help, too. And if you rank well for keywords with high search volume, you’ll see a bump in your score for that as well.

How to Increase SEO Visibility 

To improve your site’s rankings and increase the number of visitors coming to it, consider the following strategies:

1. Focus on producing quality content that’s relevant to search intent
2. Write the right meta tags
3. Consider site architecture   
4. Design for mobile first 
5. Build backlinks

For more details on the above strategies, check out SEO Visibility Score: How To Find Yours and Help It Grow. For the purpose of this guide, we’ll dig into a big one — content production strategies. 

Tips for Producing Quality Content 

Bill Gates coined the phrase “content is king” in 1996. Nearly 30 years later, is that still the case? We think so. However, its application and strategy continue to evolve.

If you need to move your site up in the ranks, don’t overlook the regular addition of quality SEO articles and copywriting. 

Find Keywords

Use keyword research to target keywords relevant to your audience that have high search volume and low difficulty. These are generally long-tail keywords—things people are interested in but aren’t so generic that everyone else is already talking about them. 

For example:

• “Website builder” has a search volume of 74,000. That’s massive, but its difficulty is 100%. Good luck with that!
• “Squarespace vs WordPress” comes in at a search volume of 1,900 with a keyword difficulty of 46%. That’s a much better option! 

To find good keywords, you can start by taking a look at your competitors. What are they ranking for that you haven’t targeted? Just make sure the terms you choose match what your readers are looking for. 

Optimize On-page SEO

There’s a lot to consider here, so we’ll revisit this in detail another time. The short of it is using your specific keyword in your title, title tag, meta description, subheads, first paragraph, alt text, and throughout your page. That’s a lot, so you’ll also need to be careful not to use it too much, as overoptimization will get you dinged. 

You also need to include secondary and semantically related keywords. These are terms related to your target keyword that help clarify the breadth and expertise of what you’ve written. 

Optimize Underperforming Content

I once worked for a well-known brand that did a content ramp in the early 2020s. At this time, adding massive amounts of content (regardless of how good or bad it was) was an effective strategy. As the years have gone by, however, the poor-quality content clogging the site is still negatively impacting ranking, even though all new content added is excellent.  

Let that brand be a lesson: Take a look at what’s already on your site and invest time into improving it. Smart ways to increase keyword rankings for older pieces include updating outdated information, optimizing digital marketing SEO, obtaining high-quality backlinks from other sites, fixing broken links, and trimming pieces that aren’t relevant or useful. 

Technical SEO

Technical search engine website optimization aims to improve a site’s architecture and back end to increase its ranking. We’ll go into detail on technical SEO another time, but you can get started now by requesting a free SEO audit. We’ll deliver a report directly to your inbox that provides a list of issues impacting your company’s website traffic as well as strategies for fixing them.

By leveraging SEO visibility, you stand to gain a competitive edge. Improve your score to reach more people and drive business. Drop us a line today to see how we can help.