Posted by
Shay Harel
As a marketer, it’s important to track how your brand compares to your competitors. Not knowing this is like navigating a ship without plotting where your current location is. You’ll never know if you are nearing your destination if you don’t know where you currently are.
Traditionally, marketers created a metric to illustrate just that. It’s called Share of Voice. Share of Voice is a 30,000-foot view of your marketing campaign demonstrating where your brand stands in comparison to your competitors.
The metric was originally created for paid advertising campaigns but, in the digital age, marketers have expanded it to include all aspects of digital marketing.
Since there are so many metrics to look at, achieving this can be a bit overwhelming.
To help you out we’re excited to announce our brand new metric…
Share of Voice (SoV)
The Rank Ranger SoV metric puts an SEO spin on the Share of Voice metric. Our new metric is designed to help you understand your site’s overall organic visibility in the context of your niche as a whole.
This new report will give you a clear, big-picture understanding of your site’s organic market share. At a glance, you can see the effectiveness of your SEO efforts by seeing how visible your site is to your potential customers and how visible your competitors are. See the screenshot below:
Share of Voice showing a site and its competitors
Understanding this will also help you understand how popular your competitors are in organic search, which will help you to assess their organic reach. This could be a useful benchmark in planning your business’s SEO goals.
Here is how it works…
Understand Your Site’s Visibility
To understand how effective your SEO efforts are, just knowing where your site ranks in Google is misleading.
The reason is simple:
Some searches get more traffic than others. That means the searches with higher search volumes could potentially result in much higher visibility than SERPs with lower search volumes.
Therefore, to truly understand your site’s organic voice, we created a metric called Visibility. The Visibility of a page measures where that page is on the SERP taking into account the overall search volume for that SERP as a whole. The metric only evaluates the top 30 spots in Google as research shows that positions beyond position 30 get almost no engagement. This metric can be applied on a page level or on a site level.
However…
Having this data, we wanted to find a way to use it to reveal your site’s overall organic power within your niche as a whole. As a result Share of Voice was created.
Share of Voice works by taking your entire site’s visibility and compares it to your competitor’s site visibility. By measuring this against all the sites in your niche you get a clear picture of where your site ranks in the niche as a whole.
Now that you understand what it is, let’s look at how you can use it.
What Does SoV Tell Me about My Site?
Since SoV is a big picture look at your site’s overall visibility, it’s best used to create or measure your overall SEO goals. In other words, by comparing your site to your competitors, you are easily able to see what your site’s ranking potential is.
Goal Setting
In other words, how much traffic potential would your site have if its visibility was the same as the top site in the industry? SoV allows you to see which site is the top in the industry. Without SoV your assessment would be a mere guess.
Once you know which site is the top in your niche, you can easily use that site’s visibility as a benchmark for your site visibility goals. This will allow you to see how your site progresses over time.
Visibility Graph showing how a site and its competitors develop over time
Once you have used this metric to set your Visibility goals, you can then use the data to figure out your SEO strategy.
SEO Strategy
Before looking at your competitor’s strategies to see how you can improve your rankings, you must have a clear picture of which site is at the top of the niche. Not knowing this might set you off in the wrong direction. As you can see, SoV solves this effortlessly.
Knowing which site is the top in your niche will allow you to use our other reports and metrics to see what strategies they are using to be so successful so that you can incorporate that strategy into your own.
Your Ranking Big Picture
In order to be successful in anything, having your sights set on the right goal is going to influence every decision you make in attaining that goal. High-level decisions will have their effects downstream. Getting this wrong can set your marketing efforts back significantly. The answer to this is Share of Voice.
You can access Share of Voice within the Rank Ranger UI as part of our Competitor Analysis in the Organic Search Reports: Organic Search>Competitor Analysis>Share of Voice
About The Author
