Some of the features described in this article might be available only for Tracked Campaigns. Learn more.
What is the SERP Feature Visibility metric?
The SERP Feature Visibility is a group-level performance metric based on a website being listed or not in a SERP feature, and on the search volumes of the keywords with SERPs where the specific 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 specific keyword list. It shows your site’s share of the total searches (impressions) out of the total potential it could get.
How is it calculated?
In SEOmonitor, we compute your website's SERP Visibility on any of the features which can list websites:
Product Listing
Images Pack
Questions
Ads Pack
Knowledge Graph
Top stories
Local pack
Featured Snippet
Recipes
News
Here's the formula we use to calculate the Visibility:
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 chart
For a business, some SERP features present the opportunity to occupy more visible space in search results. If you're looking at ranking in one of the SERP features, you can track their performance over time using the Rank Tracker's Visibility chart.
You can view the Visibility metric for any of the SERP feature types that list websites within their content. The list of options in the Visibility drop-downs (above the chart) is narrowed to only those that appear on the keywords in the selected group on a specific date, and meet the following criteria:
the keyword group contains at least 1 keyword where the SERP feature is present on a particular day, even if the SERP feature Visibility is 0%.
if multiple SERP features are displayed in the drop-down, they are sorted descending by their occurrence rate on the keywords in the group.
Example:
On May 16th, this group contains keywords that are present on the following SERP features:
You can choose between any of these SERP features in the Visibility chart drop-down (desktop or mobile) to view the SERP feature Visibility and compare it with other Visibilities (e.g. Questions vs. Mobile Visibility):
SERP Feature Visibility trend
Depending on the type of business of your tracked website, its keywords have a predominant SERP feature. SEOmonitor automatically selects the SERP feature Visibility for the one that is most listed on the tracked keywords in a group (either Local Pack, Top Stories, Featured Snippet, or Hotels).
The SERP feature Visibility trend is an adapted version of the main 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), we filter the keywords where the specific SERP feature is present. Then we display what’s going on in the explainer sidebar on two levels:
The changes in the listing and in search volumes, at a keyword list level, and their impact on the SERP feature Visibility.
The list of keywords with SERP features that registered search volume changes that influenced the SERP feature Visibility trend, ordered by their impact on the metric.
You can find this data in any of your groups' top stats, in the group Visibility metric and trend card, which on click, opens the Visibility trend explained sidebar with the most relevant SERP feature Visibility breakdown (third tab).
When archiving a keyword, you can choose to recalculate the Visibility historically. With this option turned on, the Visibility trend will be recalculated without the presence of the archived keyword. If turned off, the Visibility will remain the same as for the previous period and an annotation will appear on the chart to explain the sudden change in Visibility.
Note:
To keep it accurate and relevant, the SERP Visibility is computed only with the main keywords, ignoring close variants, just like the main Visibility metric. The close variants’ search volumes are already included in the main keywords' volumes (that’s how Google Ads reports search volumes), so if we took them into account, we’d distort the value (duplicated search volumes in the formula).
If Google aggregates or de-aggregates a keyword (even though rarely), we exclude these shifts in aggregation to calculate the metric.
The Visibility trend is calculated only for the keywords tracked for the entire selected timeframe, which also had the SERP feature present at the beginning of the interval. This approach ensures that the displayed change in Visibility reflects the website's performance specifically for the tracked keywords, without being influenced by keywords that were added during the selected timeframe. The inclusion of such keywords naturally alters the Visibility baseline of the keyword group, and by excluding them, the system maintains a more accurate representation of the website's performance.
Despite SERP feature variations between desktop and mobile, you will see the same search volumes in both views because we don’t split the search volume by device when computing the Visibility metric.
To summarize, the SERP feature Visibility metric is a valuable tool for reliably measuring the SEO performance trend of a website. It takes into account whether the website is listed or not in specific SERP features and considers the search volumes associated with those keywords. By understanding and analyzing the SERP feature Visibility, you can optimize your strategies and enhance your website's overall search Visibility.