Wait...what happened to my damn site now, and why is it nowhere to be seen on the first page of Google?!

Sometimes diagnosing a loss of SEO visibility is quite easy. But not always. If you're not completely lucky, things can be a bit more complicated than expected. So, if you're worried that your website may experience an SEO loss, you're in the right place. Read on to learn what SEO visibility is, how it is different from SEO traffic, and how to identify and combat a potential drop in visibility and/or traffic.

What is SEO visibility?

Probably the simplest way to define SEO visibility would be:

SEO visibility is a metric that tells you what percentage of all possible organic clicks (from SERPs) a website gets for a particular keyword.

In other words, SEO visibility is not understood in terms of raw traffic numbers, but rather your ranking in the SERPs themselves in relation to your competitors. I know this may seem a bit complicated, so let's boil it down to an example:

• 100% SEO visibility is the absolute best edge case that never actually happens. It would mean that your website owns all the organic spots in Google for a given keyword and all the “clickable” SERP features.
• 35% SEO visibility is when you rank #1 for your keyword. Here, 35% represents the number of clicks you can generally expect to get when ranking #1 for a search term.
• If you say that, say #10, then your SEO is visible at 2%. From there it goes as you would expect.
• Finally, ranking outside the first page gives you 0% SEO visibility. After all, page two of Google is the best place to hide a dead body.

In addition, the values ​​are added if you take more than one spot. So for example #1 and #2 means 55% SEO visibility.

Why does SEO visibility matter?

As in, why worry about your SEO visibility score?

1. With SEO metrics you can quickly solve SEO problems

Search visibility is a great metric to help you determine whether you've been hit with an algorithm update or a penalty.

2. It gives you a bird's-eye view of your site's overall SEO performance

It tells you how big your piece of the available traffic pie actually is.

For example, just looking at your raw SEO traffic numbers won't give you much insight into how much more traffic there is left to grab.

3. You can compare your results for specific keywords without getting into absolute numbers

This way you can see room for improvement more quickly.

For example, if you get 200 visitors for keyword 1 and 100 for keyword 2, it may not be immediately clear which of these keywords deserves more attention.

However, since the visibility for the former is already at 55% (ranking you both #1 and #2), while the latter is at 12%, that means the former is pretty much optimal in its potential, while the latter is still editable and improved.

With that said, there's probably one aspect of this topic that's kind of confusing, and that is:

Is “SEO visibility” a synonym for “SEO traffic”?

In a word, no.

Here is the key difference between SEO traffic and SEO visibility:

LET IT BE CLEAR
SEO visibility is a relative value shown as a percentage. It tells you what percentage of the available clicks you get. SEO traffic is an absolute value. It is the exact number of visitors (clicks) you get.

An interesting implication of this is that your SEO traffic may fluctuate, while your SEO visibility remains stable. For example, one week you get 2000 visits from a keyword, and the other you get 2200 - while you already rank 1 for the keyword both weeks.

In this, gaining/losing SEO traffic is not always caused by a gain or loss of SEO visibility. However, gaining/losing SEO visibility will always impact your SEO traffic.

This makes looking at your overall SEO visibility perhaps the quickest way to spot any SEO issues, including Google penalties, algorithm updates, and even technical issues.

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