Comparing Keyword Rank to Website Visibility

As SEOs, we all know how important keyword rankings are.

Rank trackers are designed to show us:

• How effective our SEO efforts are
• Opportunities to gain better rankings and more traffic

But…

It’s sometimes important to take a step back and look at how your entire site is performing and not just focus on individual keywords.

The Similarweb rank tracker helps you do that.

In this post, I’ll show you how the Similarweb rank tracker shows you both keyword rankings and website visibility.

Keyword Rankings

Our rank tracker shows you daily changes in your keyword rankings. This helps you track how your SEO efforts are doing on a per-page basis. What’s more, we show you:

• The keyword search volume
• Your URL position trend
• Potential SERP features ranking on the SERPs

Use this report to track your successes and uncover new ranking opportunities. But those metrics only inform you how your URLs are performing for single keywords.

It’s also important to gain a holistic view of the success of your website across all of your tracked keywords.

To solve this, our rank tracker also includes three visibility metrics.

Website Visibility

The Similarweb rank tracker shows you:

• Weighted Average Position
• Visibility
• Clicks

These metrics are measures of how your entire site is performing. I’ll explain how you can also use it to measure separate sections and keyword clusters later in this post.

Weighted Average Position

Weighted Average Position is a measure of how all your keywords are ranking within the top 100 ranking positions. This is a ranking metric with a difference. We adjust your keyword rankings based on search volume.

Because, let’s face it, if a keyword is ranking position #1 but gets no search volume, that #1 ranking is pretty worthless. To solve this, the Weighted Average Position gives keyword rankings with higher search volumes more ranking value and keywords with lower search volumes a lower ranking value.

Visibility

Visibility is a measure of how visible your site is within the top 30 ranking positions. Simply speaking a higher ranking with a greater search volume will have a higher visibility score than a lower ranking or one with a lower search volume.

Because rankings that are sitting below the top 30 results offer you no traffic potential at all. To solve this our visibility metric only measures the top 30 results and adjusts the score based on search volume.

As you can see the Visibility metric is measured as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the more visible your site is.

Clicks

Clicks is a metric that shows you how many clicks your entire site has earned over time. Use this to see what effect your rankings have on your traffic.

What Visibility Metrics Mean to You

It’s important to understand that these metrics are site-wide. This means if your Visibility or Weighted Average Position is growing or shrinking your entire site is improving or losing ground.

What’s more, by looking at these site-wide metrics you can see how changes in your individual keywords are affecting your entire site for better or worse.

But, what if you just want to see how your site is performing within a specific segment?

Easy. Just set up keyword tags.

Visibility Metrics Together With Keyword Tags

The easiest way to see how your site is performing within a specific keyword cluster or subtopic is to segment your keywords by using keyword tags.

Once you’ve segmented your keywords into different tags, you can use your visibility metrics to see how well each of those tags is performing.

Allow me to demonstrate.

In the campaign below, the campaign keywords are segmented into different tags. Each tag represents a different keyword cluster.

So if I just look at the Road Runner keyword cluster, the rank tracker only shows me keywords in this cluster. What’s more, I can now see how well my site is performing within the Road Runner keyword cluster.

Looking at the different metrics, I can easily see how visible on average the keyword cluster is or how well the keyword cluster is ranking. But just looking at rankings is one-dimensional. You can quickly see the effects of your rankings by looking at how many clicks each segment is getting.

Visibility, Your Sitewide Ranking Metric

As you’ve seen from this post, there are times when looking at the big picture is useful. Yes, you should focus on improving each page and each keyword, but Visibility shows you how those wins impact your site as a whole.

What’s more, the metric will quickly show you if there are any seismic shifts in your overall metrics. Because when this happens you might need to dig into your data and see what’s happening. Dramatic Visibility shifts will show you when to do that.

by Darrell Mordecai

Darrell creates SEO content for Similarweb, drawing on his deep understanding of SEO and Google patents.