Website Visibility in Search
Website visibility is an aggregate metric of how often and how high a website appears in search results for tracked queries. Unlike the position for a single query, visibility describes the overall picture in one number.
How It Is Calculated
There is no single formula: each service calculates it differently. The general principle is the same — positions for all queries are weighted considering click-through rates and sometimes frequency, and summed into an index. Therefore, comparing absolute visibility values between services is meaningless, while tracking dynamics within one service is useful.
How Visibility Is Better Than Average Position
| Situation | Average Position | Visibility |
|---|---|---|
| One query moved from 30 to 3 | Changes slightly | Increases significantly |
| Ten queries shifted from 60 to 45 | Improved | Almost unchanged |
| New queries added outside the top | Dropped sharply | Did not drop |
The average position is deceptive: it worsens simply from adding new queries to tracking. Visibility is free from such distortion because it considers the weight of the position, not its number.
How to Read Dynamics
- Monitor the number of queries in the top-30: it grows earlier than the top-10 and is the first to show that work is progressing.
- Compare periods of equal length, not individual days.
- Note the dates of changes on the site — otherwise, the graph has nothing to compare with.
- Remember seasonality: a drop in visibility during the off-season does not indicate a problem.
What Visibility Does Not Show
Neither traffic nor revenue. It is possible to increase visibility for queries that do not bring customers. Therefore, it is useful as an indicator of movement, but decisions are made based on clicks and applications — see conversion.
How Many Queries to Track
A representative picture requires several dozen queries, selected consciously: the commercial core plus main informational topics. A thousand random queries in tracking makes the graph look nice but unreadable — it is impossible to understand what exactly changed and why.
Keep two groups separately: queries for which the site exists and queries for which you are currently growing. The first group shows results, the second shows movement.