4 Strategies to Enhance Your Site’s Search Visibility
Do you ever feel like search engines are ignoring you? That you’re doing everything right, but Google is passing you by?
The good news is that Google isn’t ignoring you. You just need to boost your search engine visibility. Search engine visibility is a metric that looks at how often your website appears in search engine results.
Once you understand your visibility levels, you can take tangible steps to boost your visibility, show up more often in search, and increase organic traffic to your website.
In this guide, we’ll break down what search visibility is and why it matters, plus give you four expert tips for boosting your search visibility.
What Is Search Visibility in SEO?
Search engine visibility measures how prominently your website appears on search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords. When we talk about visibility, we aren’t just looking at your ranking position, but the overall reach you have across multiple search queries.
Search visibility considers several factors, including:
- Keyword ranking position
- Whether you achieved the Featured Snippet
- Click-through rates (CTR)
Think of visibility as an aggregate metric that reflects your overall performance in organic search results. The more visible you are, the more likely you are to show up higher in the SERPs for queries that bring more visitors to your site.
Do I Need Search Engine Visibility?
Absolutely! Millions of other webpages compete against yours to stand out in the Google search results.
Most search engine users don’t look past the first page of results, so if you’re ranking pretty low on the SERP, searchers will never find you—no matter how relevant your content is.
Optimizing your search engine visibility for higher rankings maximizes website traffic and conversions, so it’s pretty important!
Search engine visibility comes with a host of other juicy benefits, including:
- Improved brand awareness
- Thought leadership and brand credibility
- Lower marketing costs
What Is a Good Search Visibility?
Search visibility is a quantifiable metric. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz will assess your website and assign it a score. Think of your search visibility score as a benchmark that shows where you stand and how you compare to similar websites in your niche.
These tools calculate search visibility by assessing your keyword rankings and click-through rates for each ranking position. From there, the software adds your CTRs and divides them by the number of keywords tracked in the campaign. That will spit out your search visibility score, expressed as a percentage.
Ideally, you want search visibility in the 35-45% range. Getting 100% search visibility is unrealistic because it’s hard to own every potential search query for your site, but shooting for a mid-range percentage is a good place to start.
How Can I Improve My Search Engine Visibility?
After calculating your search visibility score, you might wonder how to give your score a little nudge. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a helpful tool for boosting organic traffic and visibility metrics. Follow these SEO tips to steadily improve your search engine visibility over time.
1. Overhaul Your Keywords
Remember, search visibility looks at how well you rank for your target keywords. If you change up your keyword strategy, you just might boost your visibility score.
You can overhaul your keyword strategy by:
- Using the right tools: Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console can identify your current keyword trends and search engine rankings. They can even suggest better keywords based on search volume and competition.
- Opting for long-tail keywords: Instead of going after uber-competitive keywords like “Florida law firm,” go for longer, more relevant keywords. There’s usually less competition for long-tail keywords and they have stronger search intent. For example, lawyers could try to rank for “Sarasota family law firm,” which will have less competition and put you in front of people who want your exact offering.
- Look at the competition: Which keywords are your competitors using? You should never copy someone outright, but a little recon can’t hurt. Use your SEO tools to see which keywords your competitors use, how well they rank, and how they use those keywords in their content.
2. Optimize Content for Search Intent
Every search engine user is looking for answers. As a site owner, it’s your job to create content that fits the original intent of the searcher. When you understand the reason why someone is doing a search, you can fine-tune your copy to meet that need.
For example, if the search intent is to compare your software against a competitor’s solution, it wouldn’t make sense to direct visitors to a page about your new features, would it? They want to see a comparison post, not a generic product page.
You can boost SEO visibility by taking a hard look at your landing pages and reworking the copy to align with the search intent and the keyword that goes along with it.
If that sounds like too much to take on right now, let Growth Machine do the heavy lifting for you. Our team of SEO specialists audits your content and creates a fully managed content plan for you.
Translation: We’ll write, edit, and post well-researched, optimized blog posts every week on your site, and you’ll watch your search visibility climb.
But don’t just take our word for it. See how Growth Machine helped a B2B company rework their content strategy to triple organic traffic in just six months.
3. Improve the On-Page Experience
What kind of experience do people have when they land on your site? You might have the best keyword strategy and content, but if your site isn’t well-structured, it will fall flat.
Search visibility depends on the user experience. Search engines care about how you treat people once they land on your site, so do your best to create a user-friendly experience.
You can improve the on-page experience by:
- Streamlining navigation to just a few simple options
- Using responsive design so your site displays well on mobile devices
- Adding meta descriptions and alt text
- Making adjustments to your technical SEO efforts, like uploading a sitemap or adjusting your robots.txt file
4. Build Backlinks From Authoritative Sources
Link building is an off-page SEO strategy that can work wonders for site visibility. Search engines see you as more reputable when other high-quality websites link to your site.
The question, though, is how to earn these backlinks. You don’t want backlinks from just any site—you need links from reputable websites that vouch for your quality.
It takes time, but you can earn more quality backlinks by:
- Creating high-quality content
- Guest posting
- Doing targeted cold outreach
- Creating linkable assets and infographics
- Promoting your content on social media
- Networking
- Working with a white hat linkbuilding agency like Growth Machine
Boost Your Site Rank With Professional SEO
Search visibility isn’t an easy nut to crack, but once you know your search visibility score, you can start improving it. Search engine algorithms change over time, so even if your visibility scores are good today, they’ll change in a few months.
The tips in this guide will get you far, but DIY isn’t always the easiest option. When you don’t have much time but still need more organic traffic, go with Growth Machine. We handle every aspect of SEO for you, from keyword research to content plans to writing to analytics.
Spend time running your business, not chasing after algorithm changes. Contact Growth Machine now to check your website’s search visibility.
