Investigating Changes In Search Visibility
What's Covered?
In this guide you’ll learn about what can cause fluctuations in your Search Visibility and how to investigate if those reasons impacted your score.
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Overview of Changes in Search Visibility
The Search Visibility score seen in Moz Pro is the percentage of clicks we estimate you receive based on your organic rankings positions, across all of the keywords you’re tracking in your Campaign.
When looking at the percentage change noted for your overall Search Visibility, keep in mind that this is the percentage by which your Search Visibility changed when comparing to the previous percentage - NOT the change seen out of 100%. For example, if the Search Visibility is 24.03% this week and is showing a drop of 2.04% since last week, this means that your Search Visibility last week was 24.53% - 2.04% higher. This is a percent of a percent.
If you’re seeing a change in your overall Search Visibility, this may be attributed to a few different things. Below are a few of the possible reasons your Search Visibility may have dropped:
- Your rankings fluctuated
- Keywords were added or removed from your campaign
- You added, removed, or changed your tracked search engines
- Algorithm changes
- Migration to a new domain
Below, we’ll outline each of these possibilities and how you can investigate if they have impacted your Search Visibility percentage.
Your Rankings Fluctuated
One of the most common reasons Search Visibility fluctuates is due to changes in rankings for the keywords being tracked in a Campaign.
Within the Rankings section of your Campaign, you can investigate whether your keywords have dropped in rankings and by how much.
For a quick visualization of how your rankings have fluctuated, select Rankings from the drop-down on the graph. You can then see how many keywords are in each rankings group, or bucket. You can also choose to eliminate certain rankings groups from the graph by clicking on them below the graph. This can help to offer an even clearer picture of how many of your keywords are ranking.
In your Tracked Keywords Overview, you can sort the table by the rate of change column to see which keywords had the most significant drop.
It’s also important to note that if you’re tracking a smaller quantity of keywords, rankings drops will impact your Search Visibility more acutely than if you’re tracking a lot of keywords in your Campaign. In other words, if you are only tracking 10 keywords and 2 of those drop in rankings, this will impact your overall Search Visibility more than if you were tracking 100 keywords.
Additionally, a drop in rankings within a higher bucket (like #1-3) will impact your Search Visibility more than a drop in rankings within a lower bucket (like #21-50). This is because Search Visibility is calculated, in part, using click through rates based on the position of your tracked keywords in the SERP. The higher the ranking for a keyword, the higher the estimated click through rate.
Keywords Were Added Or Removed From Your Campaign
Adding or removing keywords from a Campaign is another common cause of Search Visibility fluctuations. This is because if the data set, or pool, of keywords used to calculate Search Visibility changes, this will change the calculation of the overall metric. For example, if you add additional keywords which aren’t ranking as high or remove keywords that are ranking, this can cause your overall Search Visibility to drop.
If you are wondering about whether keywords were added or removed from your Campaign around the time you saw a change in your Search Visibility, you can check within the Rankings section of your Campaign.
To get started, select Rankings from the graph drop-down. The y-axis on the right hand side of the graph will represent the tracked keyword count for the data set you’re viewing. This can be an easy way to see if keywords were added to, or removed from, your Campaign. We have 2 examples outlined below.
In this first example, high-ranking keywords were added to the Campaign which caused a significant increase in Search Visibility.
In the below example, low-ranking keywords were added to the Campaign which caused a significant drop in Search Visibility.
Similar effects can be seen in Search Visibility when keywords are removed from a Campaign. Therefore, if you’re seeing huge swings in your Search Visibility percentage, be sure to verify if you or a teammate have added or removed keywords to your Campaign recently. And remember, adding or removing keywords from your Campaign will not impact your metrics until the following weekly Campaign update so it may take up to a week to see the results of these changes reflected in your reporting.
You Added, Removed, or Changed Your Tracked Search Engines
Adding, removing, or changing the search engines you’re tracking in your Campaign can cause a change in your Search Visibility because your site may be ranking differently on each search engine you decide to track.
The easiest way to see if and when you changed the search engines you’re tracking in your Campaign is to export the CSV of your rankings for the timeframe in which you think the change was made (or for All Time if you have no reference for when the change may have been made).
The CSV export of your rankings will include data for any search engines you tracked in your Campaign in the past. If your CSV export includes different search engine variants than what is currently being tracked in your Campaign, this means you added, removed, or changed those search engines at some point.
CSV exports for rankings include a row of data per keyword for every data collection within the selected time frame allowing you to use the data collection dates to verify when these changes were made.
Within your Campaign itself, you can verify which search engines you are currently tracking.
To find the last data collection for a particular search engine, filter or sort the CSV to find the last data collection with rankings information for that particular search engine. By removing the blank entries from the SERP Date column, we can confirm the most recent collection for that search engine.
Algorithm Changes
Google frequently makes updates, big and small, to their ranking algorithms. These changes can impact a site’s rankings and Search Visibility. Fortunately, there are a few ways to investigate Algorithm Updates to see if they may have impacted your Campaign’s Search Visibility.
Within your Campaign itself, you can check to see if an Algorithm Update has been noted in your Rankings section on the Search Visibility graph. Algorithm Updates are noted with a grey, vertical line. By hovering over the Google icon on the graph, you can learn more about the update.
Additionally we offer a few resources to help monitor Algorithm Updates and how turbulent the SERPs are each day via MozCast. These tools can be a fundamental part of investigating fluctuations in rankings.
Migration to a New Domain
If you’ve recently changed your domain or moved from http to https, this can impact your Search Visibility as the pages ranking for your site and your overall rankings may change as a result. The best way to verify if there has been a recent change to your domain or protocol is to reach out to your web developer or hosting provider.
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