As an SEO specialist, you want to make sense of the keywords you’re optimizing for and measure it against your competitor’s performance.
For instance, do you know how much traffic you’re generating for your page based on your target keyword(s) and search position?
By answering this question, you’ll be able to derive insights about your content versus competitors within search engine result pages. From here, you can make the necessary changes to adjust the direction of your SEO efforts.
This is precisely what SEO Share of Voice (SoV) is about.
What does Share of Voice mean in marketing?
Share of Voice is a metric that measures how much awareness do people have about your brand.
For example, when it comes to copier machines, Xerox has an overwhelming SOV over its competitors. In fact, some people use “xerox” as a replacement for the word “copy”. This goes to show how strong the brand’s Share of Voice is.
What is SEO Share of Voice?
SEO Share of Voice is the percentage of your market’s total estimated search traffic going to your website. It is an analysis that shows which websites are shown most often for a keyword set or topic in organic search results.
The higher your SEO share of voice is, the more traffic from organic search results is generated for your website. This means your website pages are ranking for keywords relevant to your niche.
If you’re not getting much website traffic that engages favorably with your website from search engines, it is because your site isn’t very visible for popular search queries relevant to your industry. Therefore, your SEO Share of Voice will be low.
If you run paid search ads in Google Ads, you should be able to find your Share of Voice for your PPC campaigns as well which is an important metric to gauge the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaigns. Based on your keyword and campaign settings, you are able to find out your website’s impressions share against your competitors.
Why do you need to track SEO Share of Voice?
You need to track SEO Share of Voice because it helps you to identify websites competing for the same topics or search terms over time.
Therefore, before anything else, you need to know why exactly you should care about your site’s Share of Voice for search.
Why you should care about your site’s Share of Voice for search
1. It simplifies SEO competitor analysis
Most SEOs do competitor research by looking at target keywords they’re showing up for in SERPs and finding ways to leapfrog over them and reach the top spot.
While this is as good as any tactic you’ll find regarding competitive analysis, adding Share of Voice into the equation along with other metrics (such as keyword metrics) allows SEOs to analyze multiple keywords at once!
Because SOV covers all keywords your website and competitors are ranking for, the metric provides site owners an overview of their website’s organic search performance against other similar sites.
From here, you will gain access to other keywords you probably haven’t researched yet. You can then target those new keywords by figuring out out how your competitors are ranking for them.
2. Helps to improve marketing efforts
Once you’ve gathered insights by comparing your site’s SEO Share of Voice against competitors, you must have a clearer picture of how to improve your site’s SEO performance and marketing strategy as a result.
3. Raise brand awareness
Your SEO Share of Voice gives you insight into your brand awareness based on your impression share in organic search results. You can use it to figure out which keywords to target and to improve ranking positions for. Eventually this will help your website to gain more visibility and capture more market share.
Related:
How to see and track competitor keywords
How to Calculate SEO Share of Voice?
To calculate the Organic Share of Voice for your website, you must first determine the estimated organic traffic your website is receiving for your target keywords.
Here are the latest click through rate averages according to the latest study by Smart Insights:
- Position 1: 39.6%
- Position 2: 18.4%
- Position 3: 10.1%
- Position 4: 7.6%
Using these figures, let’s say you’re ranking in the 2nd position on Google in the US for a keyword with 10,000 monthly searches.
To calculate the estimated clicks you will receive from organic search results based on your ranking position, multiply the search volume with the average click through rate percentage that corresponds to your ranking position.
Here’s the formula:
Estimated traffic = Monthly search volume x click through rate % according to SERP position
Using the formula above, we can estimate the approximate number of clicks your page is receiving relative to these factors:
10,000 * 0.184 = 1840
Therefore, your page has an estimated search traffic of 1840 for this keyword.
Now that you know the formula, you must do this for all your target keywords!
Once you have determined the estimated traffic for all keywords you’re ranking for, you can now measure the Share of Voice for SEO by using the following formula:
Sum of Estimated traffic from all ranking keywords / Total search volume of all keywords
Let’s say the keywords you’re ranking for have a total organic search volume of 200 million, and your site is generating 2 million organic visitors from these keywords. Replace the equation above to
2,000,000 / 200,000,000 = 1%
Therefore, your site’s SEO SOV is 1%.
To put this data into context, you also need to work out the SEO SOV of your top competitors too.
Keyword.com makes calculating SEO SOV easy
As you can see, calculating Share of Voice for search is very time-consuming, especially if you’re covering thousands of keywords for your site. However, it’s good to understand the manual process of calculating Share of Voice.
With Keyword.com, tracking SOV is easy. Our Share of Voice measurement tool allows you to view your website’s SEO Share of Voice and compare it with your competitors without having to do any manual calculations of your own.
After signing up for an account, you must add your website as a project. Then, you can add in all the keywords or upload a list that you want to track.
Once you’ve added your target keywords, give the tool time to gather data for your site’s keywords. After some time, you should be able to see your Organic Share of Voice on the Overview tab.
Keyword.com will show you the top 10 domains with the highest SOV for the keywords you entered in your project.
It also shows you a line graph of their progress over time. By default, you can see the domain’s progress of their respective Share of Voice for the past 30 days. You can change the timeframe up to 365 days if you want to have an in-depth look at how each domain progressed over time.
How to Use Organic Share of Voice to Improve Your SEO Efforts
Based on your target keywords, Keyword.com gives you a list of the top 10 domains that have the highest share of voice.
If you don’t see your website in this list, it means you definitely need to up your game and improve your SEO share of voice.
To find out why your Share of Voice is low, identify keywords that you need to increase your organic search rankings for.
You will see the percentage of keywords these are in the Ranking Average vs. Distribution section at the bottom of the page. It gives you the breakdown of the keyword rankings divided into buckets (top 1-3, top 4-10, etc.).
Over time, Keyword.com shows how your keywords are trending. For example, if the percentage of keywords in the top 1-3 positions is decreasing, you need to determine what those keywords are and optimize for them to restore high rankings on organic search.
Another benefit of using Keyword.com’s Share of Voice is to determine your actual SEO competitors.
You may already have a list of competitors you’re comparing your site to prior to measuring Share of Voice. However, what you’re probably not taking into account is how your competitors are ranking for the same keywords as you.
Keyword.com helps validate websites based on their Share of Voice. The fact that these domains have the highest SOV for your keywords means you should research about their SEO strategy as well. This allows you to potentially uncover topically relevant keywords to your market that you weren’t aware of before!
Conclusion
SEO Share of Voice is one among many vital competitive metrics all site owners must look into if they want to increase their organic traffic.
You can start by computing the SEO Share of Voice manually. But if you want to get the most out of your SEO strategy, Keyword.com is a great starting point to calculate Share of Voice of your website and competitors. At the same time, the tool lets you track your keyword ranking positions and monitor their performance over time.
Sign up for a free 7-day trial now by clicking here!
