What is SEO Visibility? How to Fix Search Visibility Loss?

What is the main feature of a website that is strong enough and manages to appeal to its target audience? Let’s say it right away: Being visible in queries involving certain keywords and being the star of the SERP! That’s why it’s possible for you to manage the SEO visibility of your website and to regain the first place you lost in Google by taking the right steps in this direction.

Are you asking yourself the following question: “Hey, what happened to my site, which was on the first page, even the first, lost rankings quickly? ”

Hey, folks, it’s time to calm down. We had a detailed discussion about the concept of SEO visibility with Screpy experts and in this direction, we will discover the ways to increase your visibility with you. In this content, we will examine the differences between visibility and traffic, the potential reasons for the sudden decrease in SEO visibility, and the ways to improve it. Hey, of course, we will not forget to answer the question of why SEO visibility matters.

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What is SEO Visibility?

Although concepts such as SEO, ranking, traffic or conversion are familiar to you, you may have heard of SEO visibility for the first time.

SEO visibility is a concept that means different things from traffic. This particular metric actually shows your power to appeal to your target audience compared to all of them. According to the authority and ranking of your site, we call SEO visibility the rate of all organic clicks that can be obtained for a particular keyword. In other words, what percentage of users searching for that keyword continue to query on your site is directly related to visibility. So traffic is related to visibility at this point, but as a metric, it is completely different from visibility. Traffic is a direct numerical value, but SEO visibility is a value presented as a percentage and gives you a clue about your power in an enormous digital marketplace.

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Facts About SEO Visibility – Explore More!

We will share with you a few facts that will make it easier to distinguish the concept of SEO visibility from other related concepts you may be familiar with:

1. The SEO visibility rate of any website, including a leading website, cannot be 100 percent. Because 100% SEO visibility means that users click on your site in all searches that occur with the relevant keyword in Google, which is impossible.
2. Research has revealed that the average SEO visibility of a website that ranks first in a keyword is 35 percent. Of course, this value can vary between 30 and 50 percent, depending on your competitors’ level of power or the nature of the word you compete with. In addition, some features such as featured snippets, which Google has increased in use recently, may cause your SEO visibility rate to decrease. Because the information that stands out and prevents the first result often guides the user behavior.
3. Let’s assume that your rank is 10 on a keyword. In this case, you can expect the SEO visibility value you will get to be around 2 percent.
4. We have already mentioned how valuable it is to rank first in a particular keyword. Accordingly, a website that is out of the first place will have around 0 percent SEO visibility for that keyword.

When do changes in SEO visibility values ​​occur?

Generally, updates made by Google and other search engines in order to provide a more user-oriented SERP cause a serious change in the ranking. This change also quickly changes the SEO visibility values.

Which websites have higher SEO visibility rates?

A website’s high SEO visibility rate should give you the following messages:

1. If you have a site that ranks higher in the search result list, that is, on the relevant keyword in the SERP, your SEO visibility rates will also be high.
2. Getting a good ranking in words with high search volumes will also strengthen your visibility rates.
3. Indexing more than one URL belonging to your domain (but not for the same keyword) will mean that you will attract more of the related searches in search engines to your site. Your pages that address semantic keywords will make it possible for more users to choose you.

Why Does SEO Visibility Important?

Now you know better what SEO visibility is and what to expect from visibility as a result of your tests. But why is SEO visibility important? While there are many metrics that you care about and try to optimize for your site, do you really need to pay attention to this metric? Let’s explore together.

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Compare Yourself with Competitors

SEO visibility is very valuable for you to understand the place of your competitors and your own website in the digital industry and the power it has with the place it has acquired. How much of your target audience can you manage to meet? How many of your target audience prefer your competitors due to low performance in matters such as ranking and indexing? Answering these questions can be very helpful in developing the right strategies.

Track Google Updates

Has a sudden update come to Google? The SEO visibility drop that you notice suddenly gives you a very important warning that you are not ready for this update. This enables you to diagnose problems, fix them as quickly as possible, and start getting the best results again.

Explore Your Place in the Industry

The biggest difference of SEO visibility from many other metrics is that it tells you which place of the industry you are in. Do you understand what that means? We are talking about a value that tells you your strength in the market according to the total volume of the keyword you compete. This means you have a bird’s eye view of the entire industry and your place in it.

See Your Growing Potential, Set Up Strategies Accordingly

We know that a website that ranks first in search engine result pages today can attract 35 – 50 percent of the total keyword searches to the site. In that case, we can say that the maximum visibility level that a website (excluding certain niche areas) can reach is 35 – 50 percent. Let’s assume that you are examining two keywords when doing SEO visibility analysis. In one, your visibility rate is 45 percent, in the other is only 9 percent. This will give you the following message: You have almost all the potential you can have in one of these words, while in one there is more room for improvement. That’s why keeping track of your SEO visibility reports can be a great way to learn about your developability potential.

What is the Difference Between SEO Traffic and SEO Visibility?

Let’s start comparing two frequently confused concepts, SEO traffic, and SEO visibility, what do you say? We can better understand that the two are completely different things.

SEO visibility is actually an extremely competitive metric and measures the proportion of your presence based on the presence of other actors in the industry. The ratio of the traffic you can access to all the traffic that makes that keyword query is visibility. So when you see the visibility rate, you cannot see the number of people directly accessing your site, but instead, you will see how much part of the full potential you can interact with. So these two concepts are completely different from each other.

So, what is SEO traffic? SEO traffic is the number of users who queried the relevant keyword and managed to reach your website as a result of the query. This query does not always have to be through the search engine. A link-building work you do, your social media platform, or users entering your site directly from another portal is also included in the traffic count. While traffic rate refers to the people who visit your site, visibility rates do not consist of exact numbers but show percentages.

How Is SEO Visibility Calculated?

In order to measure the SEO visibility value of a website, it is necessary to pay attention to more than one data type. For example, the volume of keywords that want to be measured is a very important detail. Moreover, the website’s rankings in these keywords are also very important for calculating SEO visibility. The frequency that the URLs belonging to the domain have a strong ranking is also considered important for SEO visibility.

It is possible to say that SEO visibility values can correlate with CTR. Let’s remember what the click-through rates are: In SERP, the rate of users who see the page in question by clicking on this page is called CTR.

Specialized Web Sites and SEO Visibility

Research on the web world has revealed that the entire performance of the page is not taken into account for SEO visibility research on websites that serve in more specialized areas. Because specialized websites often get traffic on long-tail and niche keywords. However, the visibility from these keywords is often not included in total SEO visibility rates.

Therefore, if you are doing a website project or blog project in a niche area, the SEO visibility values ​​you get using various tools may not reflect the full performance of your website. For this, it may be a better method to look at your ranking and traffic values ​​in these keywords.

Unrealistic Results in SEO Visibility Values

When calculating SEO visibility values, sometimes keyword rankings that are not related to the actual traffic and service of the website can be included in the results. This causes the report values ​​to diverge from the real results.

Let’s give an example: If a domain is in a low position in keywords that are not related to its service but these keywords are considered during the calculation, the SEO visibility value will be low. But actually the performance can be much higher.

How Do You Know That SEO Visibility Is Decreasing?

Is there a problem with SEO visibility values? In order to understand this, you first need to discover the existence of loss by using the most accurate indicators. We have mentioned a few points that should attract your attention. Let’s examine.

Potential Gains Down at Conversion Funnel

Achieving less gain in the funnel technique you apply is mostly related to the decrease in your traffic. As you can imagine, the decrease in your traffic is also very important information that your sales have dropped significantly. If your conversion rates (for example, comments to your blog content, share rates, or purchase rates of your content decrease) make sure to check the SEO visibility values.

With the website traffic, the decrease in SEO visibility will first manifest itself as a decreasing potential customer.

Sudden Decrease in Organic Traffic

Have you ever experienced a sharp organic traffic decrease, especially after Google Updates? The most important reason for this is that your ranking changes suddenly and accordingly, the users searching for the keyword are now starting to encounter other websites, not you. This naturally decreases your SEO visibility rates, that is, your pie share in this sector. Hey, you will have to deal with the almost zero rate, especially if you back down to the second page.

You can regularly do tracking using tools such as Screpy and Google Analytics to see the statistics decrease. If you have noticed that you are experiencing a decrease in organic traffic, you can examine your historical position in a specific word via Screpy Keyword Tracking tool. The period when the decline first started may be giving you information about the Google Update that you could not adapt to.

Take care to take the most exact date possible to find out the reason for the organic traffic decrease and the low SEO visibility associated with this decrease.

When examining the graphics about your site, especially if you see a half-U-shaped movement in the graphics, your SEO visibility values may be in jeopardy. Check out the chart below:

 This is an extremely sharp drop and may be related to the ranking which is declining fairly quickly. But you don’t have to go this far to associate traffic drop with visibility. Smaller drops can also negatively affect visibility. For example, the chart below is also an unfavorable scenario that requires you to understand what the problem is:

Falling Back in Ranking – Use Screpy Keyword Tracking Tool

Did you know that Screpy regularly monitors your ranking performance in all the keywords you have determined and informs you about the changes with notifications accordingly? Hey, everything is under your control here!

We’ve said it before: Being ranked first in SERP for a keyword means your visibility rates can be as high as 50 percent. The second and third rows also get strong results in terms of visibility rates. Even the tenth rank can have serious traffic with around 2 percent visibility. However, lowering your rankings quickly means gradually decreasing traffic and almost zero visibility from the second page onwards.

So if you get an alert about ranking, remember that you also have a problem with seo visibility.

What Can Be Done to Improve SEO Visibility?

Improving the SEO visibility rates of your website requires recognizing the main reasons that cause the decline and working on them. We will have a few different suggestions for you. If you are ready, we start.

Check Functionality After Updates On Your Site

What software do you use on your website? Shopify, WordPress, Woocommerce? Whatever you are using, it is really important to check the functionality of your site after updating the software. If the update is poorly designed or caused something wrong with your source code, your redirects, canonical links, settings, and more may be damaged. Negative changes that will not be liked by Google will cause your ranking and therefore your visibility to be negatively affected. So, check out the graph when the traffic fell for the first time and check out the update at that time, folks.

Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

With a decision taken in 2021, it will now be a valid procedure for all mobile-first indexing websites. So now the actual versions of websites are their mobile versions. What does this mean?

Let’s say it right away: if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, the probability of Google to recommend, highlight and rank you is almost zero.

A study conducted in 2017 revealed that more than half of the internet users in the world are connected to the internet from mobile devices instead of desktop. In Asia and Africa, there is a serious population using the internet only on mobile devices.

So you know what should happen, do a detailed mobile compatibility test. Check if your website is mobile responsible and reconfigure the entire site if necessary. Be sure, this will be your investment with the highest ROI.

Check Your Server

Is it possible that the main reason why users cannot access your site is that there is a problem with your server? If Googlebot tried to crawl your site while your server was down and therefore failed, this may have caused your rankings to drop.

But since you cannot monitor your server at all times, how can you be sure that you are performing properly?

Let’s say it right away: Thanks to Screpy’s advanced Uptime Monitoring service, you can receive an e-mail notification about every time your website server fails and experiences downtime, and you can get news from it when your website is on the air again. Thanks to its Uptime Monitoring service, Screpy constantly checks your site and helps you immediately know when your site is out of service. Remember, the visibility and accessibility of your website depend on the constant and correct operation of the server that host it. If your server has interruptions for longer or higher frequency than normal, your rank may drop.

Make Sure You Are Using Canonical Tags In The Right Place

Do you have duplicate content on different pages of your website? Ok, we can handle this. Of course with canonical links. However, many website owners can damage their site due to improper use of these tags.

So, what is a canonical tag? To put it briefly, when you want to add one of the web pages containing duplicate content to the index but do not want to show the other in SERP, the tag you use is called a canonical link. Thanks to these links, there is no confusion between the pages with the same content, and the authority is not divided between the two pages. Instead, only one page is indexed, and entries to the other page are redirected to the first page.

Everything okay so far, right?

Good.

If you confuse relative and absolute URLs when using this tag, you may have serious problems. In fact, this will mean that your page with a high ranking is suddenly replaced with a low authority page and your SEO visibility level in the specified keyword will decrease significantly. Remember, it is very important to use these tags correctly.

Let’s give a little tip: What we said above is also valid for the hreflang tag. Be careful how to use it too and don’t confuse relative and absolute URLs. Whenever you make changes on your website via various tags or updates, it is always necessary to check the SEO visibility and see if there are any problems.

Is Everything OK With The Design Of Your Website?

When you make changes in the design of your site, some changes may occur in the technical features of your site. For example, depending on the design you use, there may be changes in the URL structure on your site, the crawlable areas of your pages may be blocked by search engine bots, the location and structure of internal links may change, and the structure of the HTML source codes in your content pages may change. The change you make in the design can have an impact on many technical details of your site.

Detailed Checklist for Checking Technical Features of the Website

Therefore, if you have just changed the design of your site, we recommend that you do the following to ensure that this change will not have a negative impact on SEO visibility. Here is the controlling SEO visibility checklist:

1. First of all, you need to check the robot.txt file on your website. By checking this file you can make sure it is not a blocked URL or search engine bot. As long as your site and page are crawlable, you can get indexed and increase your visibility. If you don’t have a crawable website, you have no weapons to fight for traffic or visibility.
2. Secondly, you need to check the htaccess file as well. Again, check out if there is a page that is blocked from being crawlable and if search engines are able to crawl pages. At this stage, it is extremely important to make sure that the canonical tags and hreflang tags are used correctly.
3. Finally, we strongly recommend that you check if there are pages on your site that are not loaded and indexed due to the 404 code.
4. You may be using various redirects on your website. But if these are hard ones, the code you should use is the permanent code, not the temporary redirect code. In other words, your browser should detect this code as 301. Make sure that this is the case.
5. It is very important that more than one of your pages do not try to rank for the same keyword. Otherwise, you will prevent them from developing page authorities. The strong prominence of a single page in the rankings is also extremely advantageous for your site’s overall authority.
6. There may be unexpected changes in the URL structure. Perform a detailed check in this regard as well.
7. Do internal links that you use on different pages on your site still go to the correct pages? There may be 404 on pages redirected due to URL changes. So check both the URLs and the nofollow / dofollow tags.

Last Word: Featured Snippets May Lower Your SEO Visibility Rates!

Updates made by Google to improve the user experience in SERP can reduce the rate of users entering the sites. A study of recent featured snippets updates revealed that a significant proportion of users who completed their queries using these snippets did not visit any site. Today, we know that featured snippets are shown in at least 12 percent of total search queries.

1. Even if you rank first in the relevant keyword, featured snippets that will be shown before you can take away some of your SEO visibility score.
2. A recent study revealed that the site ranked # 1 on a non-featured snippet SERP page has an SEO visibility of at least 26 percent.
3. If featured snippets are shown in SERP, this rate decreases to at least 19.6 percent. A 8.6 percent rate is created by those who prefer Featured Snippet.
4. Therefore, it is extremely important that you adapt to such updates implemented by Google in order to improve the user experience in SERP and work with a correct content editor and write content suitable for display in featured snippets. You know what to do for this: Give simple, clear and correct answers to the questions you ask in the content. Remember, featured snippets are often shown in response to questions asked with long-tail keywords.

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