Going digital is essential for every business, especially with the transformation from traditional to digital marketing. But is it enough to just have a website? 

The answer is no. 

Having a well-structured website is important, but more than that, it is important for your website to be visible by Google and other Search engines. Search engine optimization is the most important thing for any website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). But what methods can we implement to improve our Search Engine Visibility to search engines? And why is search engine visibility important?

What is Search Engine Visibility?

Search engine visibility is a metric that tells you the percentage or score of all organic search results or clicks your website gets for a target keyword. According to this report, a 100% SEO visibility score is almost never possible. It means your website has all the organic spots in Google or any other search engine for a target keyword and all other SERP features. You get 35% SEO visibility when you’re ranking in 1st position and a 2% SEO visibility score when you’re ranking in 10th position. If your keyword ranks on Page 2 in the SERP results, your SEO visibility score is almost 0%.

So how do we calculate and increase our search engine visibility score? 

• The calculation of search engine visibility score includes compiling several keyword data like search volume, ranking positions, and domain URL frequencies.
• Then an estimated click-through rate (CTR) is calculated for each SERP position. Different SERP results like a video snippet featured snippet and 1st position ranking keyword (KW) have different CTR rates.
• After this, you have to add all the CTRs and have to divide them by the total number of KWs you’re tracking.

A search engine visibility scores an important KPI (Key Performance Indicator) to understand how well working for a website is. If your SEO visibility score is low, you can work on the lowlights and different strategies to improve on them. You can also compare SEO visibility scores with competitors and across different search engines to understand your website better in organic search results.

Now, as much as it is important to stay on top of your game and rank in the top SERP results. Sometimes your website rank can go down, too, decreasing your search engine visibility score. 

Here are a few reasons why your SEO visibility score can drop:

1. You have removed or added different KWs from your SEO campaign.
2. Your overall website ranking has dropped.
3. Domain migration.
4. Update or new search engine algorithms, among many more.

The next important thing is to understand why SEO visibility is important.

Why is Search Engine Visibility Important?

Here is a list of reasons why Search Engine visibility is important.

• Search visibility gives you an overview and insight into your website’s visibility on search engines. This ultimately relates to visibility to users.
• It helps you detect problems in your site and how to fix them, keeping the end user in mind.
• The lack of certain attributes to your site can adversely affect your site ranking. Search engine visibility improvement methods help in fixing such issues.
• Search Engine visibility techniques analyze your page content and the general health of your site. This helps in creating content strategies.
• Search Engine Visibility gives you an edge in the market since users prefer to click on sites that are popular on search engines.
• Sites that have better visibility gain quality backlinks and excellent link equity.
• With good visibility, it is easier to reach your target audience.

5 Strategies For Improving Search Engine Visibility

Use Relevant Keywords

Keywords are one of the most important elements of website ranking, crucial to understanding what users are searching for. This knowledge is gained via a thorough understanding of the most relevant keywords searched on a daily basis and also an understanding of daily trends. 

Conducting proper keyword research is an important element of organic ranking. The first thing to do is to find relevant keywords for your website content. If your website is focussing on the “beauty industry,” it is important to add “beauty” related KWs. This will help your content to be seen more by the targeted niche audience.

During keyword research, checking the keyword difficulty (KD), traffic potential, and global volume is very important. 

Keyword difficulty measures how likely your keyword is to be ranked positively, from 0-100. The higher the KD is for a KW, the more difficult it is to rank among competitors. 

Take a look at this example for the KW “long tail keywords.” The KD is 84 depicting that the KW is very difficult to rank even though the global volume is 12000.

LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) can help you with ranking positions. These keywords are not the focus of KW but are conceptually related to the target keywords. The KD of LSI keywords is less, increasing the chances of ranking in organic search results. Here is an example of the KW “long tail keywords vs. short tail keywords.”

Along with proper KW research, it is also important to maintain the optimal KW density in the content and the placement of the target KW in headings, including title tags, H2 and H3 headings, image alt tags, URL, and meta descriptions.

Easy Website Crawlability And Indexing

Imagine having a website that isn’t visible to the search engines. How will it rank in organic search results?

This can happen if your website is not crawled and indexed by Google. Crawlability is the ability of crawlers or search engine bots to crawl your website through links to analyze content. Once a website is crawled, the next thing is to index web pages. Web pages which are not indexed are not visible in SERP results. For crawlers to understand your website content better, you have to keep your content updated with relevant keywords. 

Here are the steps you can do to hasten the process of Google recognizing your website:

• Submit your website sitemap to Google. The sitemap contains the list of websites that need to be indexed by Google. This is usually done by submitting the sitemap in XML format in the Google Search Console (GSC).
• Add more internal links. Adding more internal links is the best way to help crawlers find new pages on your website. Crawlers choose a seed URL and follow links to visit or re-visit different web pages. Adding more internal links will facilitate web crawlers to discover your website pages faster, catalyzing the indexing process.
• Run a technical SEO audit to understand the gap in website structure. An audit will help you understand how well a given website is running and what improvements you can make to improve your overall website for your audience and search engines.

Emphasis on Local SEO visibility

For a startup business or even a well-established one, it is important to have a local presence online. 

Local SEO is the practice of optimizing a website for ranking in local search results so that you show up in places near you. The right strategy for local SEO practices will make your business stand out even against tough competitors. 

For example, say you want to search for “restaurants near me.” You will get a search result like this:

If your website is optimized with local data, including your physical address, phone number, opening timings, and images, your shop will appear in the organic search results.

Other benefits of local SEO for increasing search engine visibility are:

• Local SEO helps bring more targeted traffic. Your website will only appear to people who are searching for specific keywords related to your business.
• An important step toward Local SEO optimization is updating your business on Google Business Profile. This will help your business to appear on Google maps for relevant search queries.
• Increase in foot traffic. The more people know about your physical shop location, the more people visiting the store will increase.

Build Relevant Content

“Content is the reason search began in the first place.”

Lee Odden, B2B Marketing Strategist.

Building high-quality and relevant content can help your website rank higher in the Google SERP ranking. By writing content, you can use targeted KWs. Targeted KWs are the primary keywords we focus on while creating content. 

Google looks for original content. If you have duplicate content on your website, Google will identify it as potential plagiarism and can also take down the article. 

Creating unique content is also important to increase on-page session time. Google looks at how long a visitor is staying on your page before exiting.

There are a few important steps that you should follow in order to create content for your website:

• Conduct research on what are the most relevant search queries audiences are searching for in your niche or industry. This step also includes a thorough competitor’s research to understand the competition.
• Writing a blog post with a topic that can answer and provide value to the audience or industry.
• Addition of videos and images to make the content visually appealing. Custom images like infographics and data charts also help in image ranking and are valuable content assets.
• Have strong FAQs in your blog with relevant questions people are asking. This will increase the odds of your article coming up in the “People also ask” section.
• Internal and external links to your blog post.

Building unique quality content is more important to bringing increased and diverse traffic rather than creating 10 random posts per week.

Make It More Mobile Friendly

According to this report, mobile devices have taken more than 63% of total organic searches, and Google alone has more than 93.68% mobile search share. These data prove that people are spending more time searching on their mobile devices than on desktops. Google has also rolled out algorithm updates focusing on creating more mobile-friendly content. They have emphasized improving websites to a responsive design for mobile-first indexing. You can make your website mobile-friendly by mainly opting for three design styles:

• Responsive design: The ability of websites to adapt to modern varying screen sizes while also providing a seamless user experience.
• Dynamic serving: a type of website where there are data stored that changes according to viewer, device, location, native language, and other factors.
• Creating a different mobile website version.

Thus it is of utmost necessity to optimize your website according to mobile devices to increase a website’s search engine visibility.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

In Conclusion

For any online business, the important thing is for people to see your website when searching for relevant keywords. There are more than 200 ranking factors that Google uses to rank a website. Search engine visibility is more important than ever as it increases the chance of your website being on top of search engine rankings.

Another important factor in helping your business is to build a strong backlink profile in your target industry. LinkDoctor can help your business to make a strong online presence by implementing the right white hat link-building strategies. Connect with us today to make your business strong tomorrow.

Related Reads:

Understanding Website Crawlability and Indexability for SEO

Toxic Backlinks: A Quick Guide in 2022

15 Best Digital Marketing Metrics in 2022