The Search Marketing Visibility Score: The easy way to grade search marketers

To be found on a search engine, visibility should be your primary goal. All the amazing A/B-tested ad copy, keyword selection, and optimized landing pages in the world won’t help if you’re not appearing higher than competitors, often, and in multiple places on the page. The Search Monitor created the Search Marketing Visibility Score™ (SMVS) for this exact reason. It measures a company’s search presence across the entire results page—Paid, Organic, and Product Listing Ads (PLA)—adjusted for a company’s specific competition.

How To Grade Any Advertiser Using Search Marketing Visibility

The Search Monitor performs daily monitoring of paid ads, organic listings, and PLA units for millions of keywords and every major US city, country, engine and native language. For each SERP section (Paid, Organic, PLA), ad appearances are combined with ranking data and frequency for every search advertiser and each of its competitors. The Search Monitor then applies a proprietary weighting and scoring algorithm to produce the SMVS. The calculations comes from eight years of experience monitoring the relationship between ads and clicks, and from daily discussions with the company’s 2,000+ search marketing clients.

Why is Search Visibility King?

A company’s search strategy is more effective when it generates multiple listings for the same query. But it’s not just about quantity of listings. The listings must rank high in each section, and appear often, to encourage searchers to trust a company and click on its links. The SMVS brings paid, organic, and PLA together into one easy-to-measure metric that forces search marketers to look at the results page holistically—which is exactly how searchers see it. Search marketers can use these scores to:

• Learn About Current Competitors: The new SMVS lets any search marketer see their relative score versus current competitors
• Identify New Competitors: Running an SMVS report also identifies unknown threats or industry entrants
• Pinpoint Areas for Improvement:   For the Paid, Organic, and PLA sections, the SMVS helps you review your performance and compare it to that of each competitor. This information is crucial for budgeting and resource allocation since a search manager can decide where to focus their efforts and devote their next dollar to maximize their total SEM presence
• Justify PPC Spend Decisions: The SMVS provides search marketers at brands or their agencies with the evidence they need to increase spend (to be more competitive), maintain current spend levels, or re-allocate budgets between Paid, Organic, and PLA.

Time and time again, we’ve seen that a company’s search strategy is more effective when it generates multiple listings for the same query. But it’s not just about quantity of listings. The listings must rank high in each section to encourage searchers to trust a company and click on its links, and be seen often. We developed a new metric for search marketers to grade their performance in the three key SERP sections: SEM, SEO, and PLA. We called it the Search Marketing Visibility Score™ (SMVS) since it’s a relative measure of your total-page visibility, and incorporates appearances, rank, reach, and frequency. And it scores you for each of your keywords.

Why Search Marketing Visibility matters

The SMVS gives search marketers several advantages over traditional search metrics:

• Learn About Current Competitors: The SMVS lets any search marketer see their relative score versus current competitors
• Identify New Competitors: Running an SMVS report also identifies unknown threats or industry entrants.
• Pinpoint Areas for Improvement:  For the Paid, Organic, and PLA sections, the SMVS helps you review your performance and compare it to that of each competitor. See table below. This information is crucial for budgeting and resource allocation since a search manager can decide where to focus their efforts and devote their next dollar to maximize their total SEM presence
• Justify PPC Spend Decisions: The SMVS provides search marketers at brands or their agencies with the evidence they need to increase spend (to be more competitive), maintain current spend levels, or re-allocate budgets between Paid, Organic, and PLA.

The SMVS tells you the formula for driving more clicks. If you’re already beating your competitors, for example, it tells you in which areas you’re the strongest, so you can keep up the good work. If you’re falling behind a key competitor, it shows you which areas need improvement. For example, your paid performance might be fine (see example of Competitor B vs. A), but you need help with organic visibility.

Want to know if your search marketing scores an A or an F?

To see your own Search Marketing Visibility Score,  request a demo for your specific set of keywords and competitors, and any time frame or location. What gets measured, gets managed!