one hour indexing

Semalt States That Blue Links Aren’t Enough to Qualify As Visibility


The year 2020 has come with so many more improvements in how the internet and search engines work. The world has woken up to the reality that search has gone beyond blue links on search result pages. Today, we see more search results coming in the form of image and voice responses. This tells web developers, and website owners like yourself that focusing on blue links alone can only get you so far. However, if you want to be the best, you will have to focus on not only your blue links but also your complete visibility. 

Figuring out what qualifies as good visibility isn’t as straight forward as it may sound. This is why many web developers focus on getting as many blue links as they can. But that doesn’t guarantee that your website becomes visible enough. 

Figuring out the difference on your own may be extremely difficult especially when you have no idea what you’re doing. If you fall in that category, do not bother beating up yourself rather, get professional help from Semalt. And no we don’t mean therapy…

With the professional help from Semalt and our wonderful team, you get to enjoy not only blue links, but visibility in every form. Our services will ensure your website pops up for voice, video and image searches. That is what qualifies as visibility. The ability for your website to be seen by a variety of searches is what makes visibility so important. 

We understand that web search is evolving. In fact, we have been monitoring its evolution for years and we understand the reactions of users to these changes. Today, search engines like Google allow users to search using images and videos in a way that's significantly more reliable and accurate that it was in previous years.

New device inputs and search outputs have also evolved so good that searchers wouldn't see blue links that previous search engines thought were all that mattered. To make sure you aren't left in the dust, you need to optimize the new tools and strategies used by evolving search engines.

What is SEO visibility? 


Semalt gives you one of the most straightforward definitions of SEO visibility you can come across. We rather not bore you with the excessively technical definition that can be simply put as: SEO visibility is the metric that shows you the percentage of clicks your website gets from organic keywords.

But unlike what you may be thinking, SEO visibility is not to be understood only in terms of the raw traffic your keywords are getting. Rather, your SEO visibility is determined by you in the SERPs themselves when compared with your competition. You may be getting up to 3,000 clicks a day, and that's great on its own. But when you compare that with your competition have up to 30,000 organic clicks a day, 3,000 looks like you haven't even started.

It is in situation like these Semalt makes all the difference. Rather than relying on the data collected from just your website, Semalt compares how much clicks go to your competitions website. We do not want that so what we do it to analyze the competition and modify your website to drag more of those clicks to your site. We do that by making sure your website is visible regardless of the mode a user uses to search. 

Let's break it down a bit.

100% SEO visibility is the best thing that could happen to your website. However, this has never happened. If this were to happen, it would mean that your website owns all the organic spots in Google for a given set of keywords. It will also mean that your website owns all the clickable SERP features. In other words, everybody is clicking your website.

Amazingly, when you have up to 35% SEO visibility, you rank #1 for your keyword's category. 35% clicks represent the amount clicks your website is expected to get when you make it to number 1. And if you're unlucky to fall outside the first page, you are expected to have 0% SEO visibility. If you fall outside the first two pages, you may need to call the website ambulance with real-time experts at Semalt to help salvage your website.

Why is your visibility so important?

1. Top SEO visibility metrics makes diagnosing and solving SEO problems quicker:
With declining search visibility, your attention is immediately drawn to the looming problem on your website. It becomes easier to notice if you've been affected by an algorithm update or a penalty.

2. It gives you a better view on your websites SEO performance: 
When you see the percentage of your SEO visibility, you know how much traffic you're leaving on the table. For example, if you focus on just the raw numbers of the SEO traffic you're generating, you may be satisfied not knowing the total number of traffic. If you participate in a race of three, you may be satisfied coming third because number three isn't so bad. But if you factor in the number of racers, you see that you did bad, so bad that you came last.

3. SEO visibility compares your results, thus directing you better. With regular SEO analysis, you can get a result like:
  • Keyword #1, 500 clicks
  • And keyword #2, 300 clicks.
You automatically think that keyword #1 is doing better than keyword #2, but that isn't necessarily true.
SEO visibility gives you the percentage of the number of clicks against the total number of clicks on that keyword. So you may discover that your keyword #1 is at 3% while your keyword #2 is at 10%. This result helps you improve your keywords that need improving, helping your website grow better.  

SEO visibility isn’t SEO traffic. Try not to confuse these two.  

In understanding why internet users should focus on visibility and not just blue links, Semalt has mapped out key areas where Visibility beats blue links.     

No query needed

A new feature on Google called "Google Discover" aims to provide internet users what they are looking for before they even type it in. This has been designed to mimic social media feeds. This feed is surprisingly accurate, and that's all thanks to the vast data Google has on what people search the most. This feature is impressive because it displays information, images, and videos compiled based on your search history and other Google activities.

No result pages

This feature directly influences the efficiency of Google voice search. Voice search is becoming a big part of how users search for information today. With a generation that's looking for faster and less stressful ways to get around obstacles, you shouldn't be surprised that over 20% of phone users already prefer using the voice search option. It shouldn't be considered a trend anymore but our reality.

Today, we have screenless devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo, which will dictate only one search result for a user. If your website isn't focused on visibility and just blue links, it won't receive visibility in the voice search.

For voice searches on devices with screens, Google still dictates the option it thinks is best but still shows other results that have blue links. Relying on this alone isn't still sufficient because many times, the user prefers to sit back and listen before considering any other result that comes up.

No textual results

Trust us when we say image search is an excellent feature for both websites and users. Before the adoption of this technology by search engines, users had to think long and hard before describing a location or product on which they needed information. With images, search has become a lot easier. This feature is excellent for searching for products or places, but it also searches for texts in pictures.