This is a group-level performance metric that takes into account if a website is listed or not in a SERP feature and the search volumes of the keywords with SERPs where the feature is present.

It is an adapted version of the Visibility metric for a website being listed (ranking) in a SERP feature, rather than in the organic results. It can also be seen as an impression share of a website in a specific SERP feature on the total search volume of the keywords where the SERP feature is present, in a given keyword list. It shows your site’s share of the total searches (impressions), out of the total potential it could get.

How does this work?

There are 4 types of SERP features on which a website can be listed and which we compute the SERP Visibility for:

  • Local Pack (Maps)

  • Top Stories (News)

  • Featured Snippet (Position 0)

  • Hotels Pack

Depending on the type of business the tracked website has, its keywords will have a predominant SERP feature, out of these 4 above. SEOmonitor will automatically select the SERP feature Visibility for the one that is most listed on the tracked keywords.

SERP Visibility = sum(Impressions) / sum(AverageSearchVolume)

(only for the keywords where the SERP feature is present)

where

Impressions = impresion_rate (listed/not listed) * AverageSearchVolume

The impression rate is measured in percentages from 0% to 100% where:

  • 0% means the website is not listed in the SERP feature on any of the keyword SERPs where the feature is present;

  • 100% means the website is listed in the SERP feature on all of the keyword SERPs where the feature is present.

SERP feature Visibility trend

The SERP feature Visibility trend is an adapted version of the Visibility trend (explainer). As there are no ranks per se, but only the property of being “listed” or “not listed” in the SERP feature(s), the explainer filters the keywords where the specific SERP feature is present. It then shows what’s going on on two levels:

  • the changes in the listing and in search volumes, at a keyword list level;

  • the keywords with changes that influenced the Visibility trend, ordered by the impact they had on the metric.

To keep it accurate and relevant, just like the main Visibility metric, the SERP Visibility is computed only with the main keywords, ignoring close variants. As the 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’d distort the value, as we’d duplicate the search volumes in the formula.

When processing Visibility trends as a number (ex: “+34%”, so not as a graph), the system only considers the Visibility trend generated by the keywords tracked for the entire selected timeframe, and also had the SERP feature present at the beginning of the interval.

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

We call it the “performance-only SERP visibility trend”. This way when the Visibility trend is red it means there’s certainly a loss of impressions and when it’s green it means there’s certainly an improvement.

The chart maps the individual days’ SERP feature Visibility, but should only be analyzed as a whole when also looking at the annotations and the details in the Visibility trend explainer.

From the performance-only Visibility trend, we have also excluded the shifts in the aggregation of close variations (which rarely occur because of Google Ads).

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

Desktop and mobile have different SERPs, so will show different SERP Visibilities, available through a switch. They do show the same search volumes because we don’t split the search volume by device when computing the Visibility metric.

Use cases

SERP feature listing performance over time

Comparing the same metric for the same keyword list over time shows the trend, so you can easily assess your progress.

Opportunity to grow in SERP feature listings

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 hard at this moment.



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