What’s Your Search Marketing Visibility Score™?

When consumers perform a search and analyze the results, they scan all sections of the page—Paid, Organic, and PLA—to find their answer. They usually don’t care where on the page their answer is, as long as they find it. Search marketers should rate their performance in the same way, as one holistic measure of how consumers see them on the entire page.

The Search Monitor’s new Search Marketing Visibility Score™ does just this. It provides a single, comprehensive score of your total search presence by integrating your number of appearances by section, theranking within the section, and then most importantly, how your data compares with that of competitors. Here’s an example

These four companies’ ads appeared after a search for ‘men’s ski jackets’. Here are the important things to note:

• If search marketers only focus on their paid ad performance, Company C’s search team would be the winner (best Paid score & rank). If only Organic was analyzed, Company D would have performed the best. And with PLAs, it would be Company A. But searchers see all 3 sections, so the SMVS shows that Company A has the highest search marketing visibility across all three sections when adjusted for their competitors
• Both Share and Rank are important when tallying up the individual scores, and they get weighted differently by section. A ranking of 6 in PLA is much better than a ranking of 6 in Organic results, for example.
• The score breakdowns are the most helpful component of the SMVS.  They tell a search marketer where they should focus their next dollar or hour of time. For Company A, the SMVS reveals that they are very strong on PLAs and should maintain their solid execution, but that Paid should be their main focus area for improvement. And for Company B, the SMVS tells them that if they just improved their PLA execution, they could likely outperform the others. And lastly, the SMVS tells Company C to focus on Organic, and Company D that they absolutely need to be doing PLAs if they want to compete.