Search Visibility
Frequently Asked Questions
What's Covered?
In this guide you will learn about the Search Visibility metric in Moz Pro, how it is calculated, and how to filter your keyword data to see Search Visibility for different segments. If you’re looking for detailed information about how to investigate fluctuations in your Search Visibility, please see our investigating changes guide.
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What is Search Visibility?
The Search Visibility score 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.
Search Visibility is one of the first metrics you'll see in your Campaign Dashboard. You can use Search Visibility to get an overview of how well your site is performing in the organic search results.
From the Rankings section you can view your Search Visibility for different date ranges and across the different search engines you're tracking in your Campaign.
Just below that is a graph showing your Search Visibility over time; you can toggle between the Weekly and Monthly views. Keep you eye out for the Google Algorithm change indicator. This is just a grey line that will pop up on the graph (vertically) any time we detect a change in how Google processes SERPs - this is a good place to start if you see a sudden drop or increase and want to explore this further.
Search Visibility will remain in view at the top of each tab of your Campaign rankings: Rankings, Engines, and Competition — everything except for Opportunities. It’ll also be updated based on what you’re looking at. For example, the Engines tab will break down the Search Visibility score based on the engines you’re tracking. Competition will do the same thing, just for you vs. your competitors.
How is Search Visibility calculated?
Your Search Visibility score is calculated by:
- Taking all of your rankings for all of your keywords.
- Applying an estimated click-through-rate (CTR) based on each ranking position. The CTR calculation ensures that higher ranking keywords are appropriately weighted in the score.
- Adding all of your CTRs and dividing by the number of keywords you're tracking in that Campaign, giving you a single metric of 0% -100%, calculated to 2 decimal points.
A Search Visibility score of 0% means you have no pages ranking in the top 50 spots in the SERPs. A score of 100% means you own all of the ranking positions for your keywords. Realistically, it is very rare for a site to score above the mid-40s for non-branded keywords.
You can use this score to track your search engine visibility progress overall, compare your site's visibility with that of your competitors, and to compare your visibility across different search engines and different locations.
Why did my Search Visibility drop?
If there is a drop in Search Visibility it could be the result of a number of factors making it a bit difficult to diagnose, but here are a few possible things:
- Your rankings dropped
- You added or removed keywords from a Campaign
- You changed, added, or removed a search engine from a Campaign
- An algorithm change occurred - check mozcast.com
- You migrated to a new domain, including migrating from HTTP to HTTPS
Be sure to check out our troubleshooting guide on investigating Search Visibility drops for more information.
Filter Visibility by Labeled Keywords
It's important to label your keywords, particularly when you add them. Your Search Visibility score is an average of all of your keywords, so when you add or remove keywords from your Campaign you will likely see fluctuations in the score that are unrelated to your site's performance. Solve this by getting in the habit of labeling keywords when you add them. With labeled keywords you can view visibility for clusters of keywords to track their performance.
To compare Search Visibility for your labeled keywords, follow these steps:
- From the Rankings section, scroll down to Tracked Keywords Overview
- In the Label filter box, enter the labels you’d like to compare
- Edit or enter new labels from Manage Labels on the right
Tada! Now you can view your performance for groups of keywords over time.
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