SEO Visibility Score: How to Improve Your Website’s Score

So, what exactly is an SEO visibility score? 

Basically, it’s a metric that reflects how likely your website is to be found in SERPS (search engine results pages) for a specific set of keywords. Kind of like a snapshot of your online store’s “searchability” and “findability.”  

The higher your SEO score, the more likely users are to find your site when they’re searching for products like the ones you sell. This comes down to where your page shows up on a search ranking.  

When you need to buy something online, what do you do? You search for it! And however you make your buying decision, we bet you’re not skipping to page 11 or 17 or 23 of the results to do so, right? 

Domain Authority (DA): A metric that estimates your site’s potential to rank well in search results. It’s like the star power of your favorite celebrity, giving them more chances to land big roles. It’s not officially a Google metric, but one that’s “estimated” by SEO tools.  

Domain authority focuses mainly on the website’s backlink profile (which is a collection of links pointing to a particular website from other websites on the internet). SEO visibility score aggregates your average rankings and expected CTR (click-through rate). And speaking of that…

Click-Through Rate (CTR): Monitoring CTR can give you valuable insights into how well your site’s metadata (metadata is the HTML tags and attributes used to describe a webpage’s content, structure, and purpose) is performing.  

It will also help you find the areas where you can improve.   

Boosting CTR involved experimenting with title tags and meta descriptions, using power words, and strong CTAs.  

Organic Traffic: Organic traffic (the number of people who find your website without paid ads involved) not only points to how good your SEO efforts are working, but also helps you figure out your ROI on the optimization strategies you’ve already tried. 

When you keep an eye on organic traffic over time, you’ll be able to spot trends, seasonal changes, and chances for more keyword optimization. This will help you improve your visibility even more and ring those customers in.  

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of your website visitors who leave after checking out only one page. When you look at your bounce rate combined with the average time on a page, you can better pinpoint specific issues that make your visitors run.   

When you tackle these issues, and provide well-organized, accurately labeled, and valuable and engaging content, visitors want to stay on your site longer and even possibly convert to customers.   

Backlinks: Backlinks are links from one website to another. They’re like a vote of confidence that the content that’s linked is valuable, relevant, or authoritative. When a site has a good backlink profile, that means the site’s owner has put out consistent effort to make and reach out with valuable content that others want to reference and share.  

If you want high-quality backlinks, take the time to guest post, collaborate, and get involved with relevant forums. Your backlink profile will always give you a good idea of your site’s authority and search engine performance.  

Keyword Rankings: Where your site ranks in search results for specific keywords. Imagine a TikTok about a miniature horse called Basil who lives in an Air BnB farm goes viral – people might use keywords like “tiny horse” or “Airbnb miniature horse” to try and find out more information.  

Niche keywords tend to have a higher “search intent” – people usually know what they’re looking for, giving you a better chance of ranking well and finding the right audience.  

As a real-world example, we used these very keywords to find this AirBnB with an actual resident miniature horse after we initially saw it as a viral post on Facebook.  

Try to use your main keywords in your titles, headings, and product descriptions, as well as naturally throughout your copy. And don’t forget long tail keywords, which are super-specific versions of your common keywords. For example, “gardening gloves” is a short tail keyword, while “best gardening gloves for pulling weeds” is a long tail keyword with a much more specific intent. 

The higher you’re ranking, the more organic traffic you’re getting. While keyword rankings are crucial, they’re only one part of a website’s SEO performance.  

Generally, you calculate your SEO visibility score by taking all your site’s ranking keywords and applying a CTR to each ranking position. Add up all the estimated CTRs per keyword – then take the number you get and divide it by the number of total keywords. This should give you a percentage (max 100%) – the closer to 100%, the better! 

If this sounds daunting, the good news is that many SEO tools can calculate your SEO visibility score for you. And there’s lots of choice! Here are three of our favorites:   

• Semrush – Semrush is famous for its extensive keyword research and competitor analysis features. 
• Ahrefs – is the powerhouse for backlink analysis and organic traffic insights. They give insights and help generate a score.   
• Moz – brings you a comprehensive suite of SEO tools, including the famous Domain Authority metric. 

So, what’s considered a “good” score? Well, the answer is: it depends on your industry! It also depends on the amount of keywords you’re tracking – the more keywords, the more likely the % will be less. 

And if you have branded keywords you’ll probably have more visibility. Non-branded keywords struggle to score as highly. 

Always bear in mind it’s not something anyone can perfect instantly. It’s an art that takes some time to get the hang of! 

SEO visibility matters for several reasons:  

• Track Page Performance: A high SEO visibility score means people are more likely to find your site, and you’ll have a better chance of gaining new customers. 

• Evaluate SEO Campaigns: Measuring the success of your SEO efforts is like assessing the impact of a viral marketing stunt. If your SEO visibility score increases after making changes, you’ll know your efforts are paying off.  
• Gain Competitive Advantage: Understanding your competitors’ strategies and outranking them is like one band outshining another in the Battle of the Bands. You can unpack what they’re doing to help you inform your own strategy. This helps you get a leg up on your competition and attract more customers.  

To improve your SEO visibility score, avoid common SEO mistakes and consider these top tips: 

• Conduct a Site Audit: A site audit helps you identify and fix anything like broken links, duplicate content, and slow-loading pages that make your visitors bounce fast.  

• Phone/Mobile Optimization: Just about everyone browses on their phone, so your online business needs to have a cell phone-friendly website. That includes things like content, layout, and load times. We have handy tips in our guide on how to make a website mobile-friendly.  

• Improve Keyword Rankings: Focus on high-priority and low-competition keywords and optimize your content around them. Use them as naturally as possible – avoid obvious keyword stuffing!

• High-Quality Content: Make content that’s engaging, informative, and share-worthy. Then you establish yourself as an authority in your niche and encourage others to want to come to you.   

• Backlinking and Link Building: Get high-quality backlinks from good, reliable websites to show search engines that you’re a trustworthy site (and return the favour for others!). 

• Technical SEO: Look at site structure, meta titles and meta descriptions, and other behind-the-scenes elements – it will really help.  

It’s important to remember that even though the SEO visibility score is useful, it does have limitations: 

• Not Comprehensive: The SEO visibility score doesn’t capture every aspect of your website’s performance. It can be like judging a movie based on its trailer alone. 

• Multiple Metrics are Needed: You can’t just go by the SEO visibility score – the more metrics, the better the overview.  

• Business Goals and Target Audience: The SEO visibility score doesn’t always let you know how well your website meets your business goals or meets your audience’s needs.  

It’s so important that your target audience and customers know you exist, and know how to find you. Otherwise, what’s the point?

That’s why it’s important to capitalize on the head start that SEO can give your online business. So don’t be afraid to have a deep dive into the SEO visibility score, how to improve it, and its limitations. 

Improving your score can help your online business thrive, but it’s essential to use multiple metrics and consider your business goals and target audience for a comprehensive SEO strategy.

Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to book a few nights with little Basil the miniature horse!!!