SEOmonitor’s Visibility is a group-level metric that takes into account both the ranks and search volumes of the keywords, to reliably express the ranking performance of a website on that keyword list.

It can be seen as an impression share of a website on the total search volume of the keyword list, based on its rankings on said list.

The Visibility shows your website’s share of the total searches (impressions), out of the total potential it could get. It is measured in percentages, from 0% (outside Top 20 on all keywords) to 100% (ranking 1st on all keywords), with its own trend shown for a given time period.

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The Impression rates by rank go from 100% (1st position) to 0% (20+).

Both ranks and average search volumes are stored on a daily basis at a keyword level, which makes its historic values consistent and reliable.

To keep it accurate and relevant, the Visibility metric is computed only with the main keywords, ignoring close variants. As close variants’ search volumes are already included in the main keywords’ ones (that’s how Google Ads reports search volumes), if we’d take them into account we would distort the value, as we’d duplicate the search volumes in the formula.

The Visibility for competitors follows the same algorithm and formulas as the above.

These are daily snapshots of the Visibility values, including any baseline changes generated by changes in the keyword list.

Automatic annotations are placed on the charts to help you keep track of those changes and their impact.

The graph maps the individual days’ Visibility, and should only be analyzed as a whole if also looking at the annotations and the details in the Trend Explainer.

We call this the performance-related visibility trend and it always comes with its dedicated explainer.

The system only considers the Visibility trend generated by the keywords tracked throughout the entire selected timeframe (so ignoring the ones added later than the start date, for example).

It does that so it can always show the change in Visibility based on the performance of the website for the tracked keywords, and not be distorted by the keywords that were added throughout the selected timeframe, which naturally change the Visibility baseline of the keyword group.

This way, when the Visibility trend is red, it means there’s certainly a loss of impressions, mainly coming from rank drops; when it’s green, it means there’s certainly an improvement.

From the performance-only Visibility trend, the changes in the aggregations of close variants are also excluded (as they rarely occur, when Google Ads re-aggregates them).

And when archiving a keyword, you can choose not to affect the Visibility historically. When you choose this option, the Visibility trend will remain the same for the previous period and an annotation will appear on the chart to explain the sudden change in Visibility.

Over time, comparing the same metric for the same keyword list shows the trends, so you can easily assess your progress.

If 100% is the maximum, then you can quantify how much you can grow by optimizing a list of keywords; a value too close to 0% could indicate that it would be too difficult at this moment.

Calculating the same metric for the same keyword list helps you compare your website’s performance against competing websites (apples vs. apples).

Desktop and mobile have different ranks, so will show a different Visibility, available through a switch. They have the same search volumes though because we do not split the search volume by device when computing the Visibility metric.

Sorting the keywords in the keyword table by rank trend will sort them by the impact the changes had on the Visibility metric trend. In other words, it sorts the keywords by the gained (or lost) impressions generated by the rank changes.