Search visibility is the measurement of how many people sees your website entries in search, and therefore a measurement of how much traffic you get. Higher search visibility equals higher organic traffic. It also is a measurement of your traffic, based upon how many times you are present in the search engine index, how high ranked you are, and how much traffic is received by the keyword phrases that you are listed for.
When it comes to having a website, one of the most important considerations is how you are going to get traffic. There are lots of different ways of getting traffic. One of those ways is through advertising. Anyone can drive traffic to their website using banner ads, pay-per-click ads or various other paid methods for driving traffic to your site.
But the preferred way to get traffic is through what is known as search visibility. Search visibility is a measurement of how many people are exposed to your website through Google (and other search engines) search results.
Three Main Factors Affecting Search Visibility & Traffic
There are three main factors that affect how visible you are in search and how much traffic you are able to get. These are just the primary factors.
Also, the higher you are ranked for those search terms, the more traffic you will be able to attract with the first few results for a keyword attracting the majority of the traffic through search. Let’s look at these in a little more detail.
Search Volume: When you choose a keyword that relates to a page of your website, or your website in general, you need to make sure that the keyword is going to be used by people. If a keyword phrase is almost never used, it doesn’t what your rankings positions are for that keyword. You still aren’t going to get traffic. The click-through-rate can tell you how much a keyword is searched for and clicked upon. A CTR calculation can be done using a tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Planner.
Placement: When it comes to a specific keyword phrase in the search results, placement is important. The more authority that your website has, the higher up it will be in the results page thanks to the Google algorithm.
Keyword Volume: If you want a higher ranking, the number of keywords that you have will definitely improve your search visibility score. Sites with high visibility show up frequently because they have lots of keywords within their content. If you want SEO visibility, you have to figure out what the ranking keywords are and make sure they are included in your content including branded keywords.
Other Factors Affecting Visibility
Those three are just the main factors that determine your traffic amount. Having the right keywords and the authority to rank high for them – as well as an abundance of different keywords that you are indexed for is just the beginning. Other factors affecting visibility include your HTML title and description.
However, your site visibility is also affected by all of the other SEO factors out there – and there are dozens if not hundreds that you need to be aware of. SEO factors improve your ranking in the search engines, ensure that all of your content is correct, ensure that the proper keywords are ending up in the search index and even give people more of a reason to click on your results because you have optimized your title tags and description to attract visitors.
So, what are these factors? Let’s take a brief look at a few of them.
SEO Factors That Indirectly Affect Visibility
Load Times: Your site load times will affect your ranking because Google prefers sites that load fast.
Images & Formatting: Your images and formatting are important because they affect your bounce rate, and sites with a lower bounce rate get listed higher in the search engine results.
HTTPS: Using the Https:// protocol will get you listed higher in the search engines than comparable sites that are still using http://.
Content Quality: Again, content quality is important because it affects your bounce rate. However, if Google happens to manually check your site, you’ll get points docked off for having low-quality content as well.
Backlinks: The number of sites linking to you – and more importantly, the pagerank of the sites linking to you – are factors that are involved in determining where you end up in the search engine results, and therefore affect your visibility. The more sites you have linking to you, with the higher PR, the higher you will get ranked.
