Visibility and share of voice

Visibility and share of voice are the two summary figures this product takes off the rank tracker. Both are estimates from a model, both are labelled as such on every screen that prints them, and both are weighted the same way.

What the weighting is

A position is worth what a position tends to earn. The weight comes from a published average click-through curve — the same one every value on the worklist is priced with — so first place counts for much more than tenth and anything past the first couple of pages counts for almost nothing.

Visibility is a round’s average of your position’s weight against the weight of first place, over the keywords you track. A keyword checked and found nowhere counts nought rather than being left out, because it was asked about.

Share of voice is each listed domain’s summed weight over the total of the listed domains, which makes it a share among you and the rivals you track rather than a share of the market. When none of those domains ranks high enough for the curve to say anything, it is not nought: it has no value at all, and the screen prints a dash.

They are the tracker, and never blended with Search Console

Both are taken on the weekly check and on nothing else. They are never blended with Search Console: a tracked check asks about one keyword, in one market, on one device, at one moment, and Search Console reports an impression-weighted average over everything you were shown for. Those are two instruments, so they sit in two charts, and the Dashboard stacks the clicks chart above the visibility strip on one timeline rather than drawing one line out of both.

What a change is taken over

A change is taken over the keywords both weeks checked. A keyword added this week moves the figure, because the figure is over this week’s keywords, and cannot move the change, because there is nothing from last week to compare it against. Where those two sets differ, the screen says how many keywords the change is actually over.

A week with no checks in it is left out rather than drawn as nought — a week nobody measured is not a week your visibility collapsed — and a line breaks there rather than running straight across.

Which checks each screen reads

The two figures are not printed in the same places. Visibility is on Home, as each project’s Position tracking figure, and on the project Dashboard; share of voice is on the Dashboard and on Domain overview’s Competitors tab. The weekly summary email prints neither — its rankings line counts keywords that improved and declined, which is a different reading of the same checks.

On all of those screens, both figures are taken on desktop checks, with every market a check was asked in blended together. The Position tracking screen prints visibility too, and there it is taken on the device and the market you are looking at, which is the one place these checks are narrowed to a market at all.

Blending two devices into one weekly figure is a deliberate omission rather than an oversight: a dated instrument has to mean the same measurement week over week, and a per-project choice would make one project’s round a two-device blend and every other project’s a one-device reading. So the dashboards stay on one device and the Position tracking screen, where you choose the device yourself, is where the other one is read.