Why Share of Search is Important for SEO
If market share represents the percentage of a market dominated by a single company or entity. In that case, Share of Search represents a company or entity’s brand visibility when compared to competitors within that same marketplace. But what is Share of Search exactly? If you tallied all of the search queries for all of the brands within a particular market, your company’s Share of Search would be the percentage of those search queries that included your brand. This metric can then provide some insight into your company’s market share and overall brand recognition. But how can you find out how to calculate Share of Search?
If you are looking for a Share of Search tool to do some quick research within your industry, you might consider looking at Google Trends or Google Keyword Planner. These tools and others can provide valuable insight into how your company performs in searches when compared to your competitors. With this information, your marketing team can develop new campaigns or other initiatives to reclaim market space or bolster your brand perception and recognition.
Understanding your company’s brand visibility and the brand visibility of your nearest competitors can tell you a great deal of information about what your potential customers are searching for. When this is paired with a tool like Google Keyword Planner, it can help you optimize your webpages for better search engine results. Even though people searching for your brand or products doesn’t necessarily mean that each one of them is making a purchase – improving the SEO of your web content can help bring more traffic to your site(s) and potentially more sales as well.
While your Share of Search may not immediately point you towards new sources of revenue, Share of Search still provides valuable insight to inform your marketing strategies and other SEO-related initiatives.
If you search “share of voice”, “Share of Search Google Trends”, or “Share of Search KPI” in your preferred search engine, you will likely find a lot of information – hundreds of millions of search results – about what it is and why it’s such a crucial metric for businesses with significant digital footprints.
To assist in calculating your company’s Share of Search, Google Trends can show you query data that goes as far back as 2004 in some cases. Google Trends also breaks down search data based on criteria like subregion and provides additional information regarding related queries. You can also filter results by whether queries were made as an image search, news search, Google Shopping, or on YouTube.
The accumulation of such broad data involving queries about your company, about your competitors, and some of the keywords people are searching can help illuminate the bigger picture within your specific market. When you can see the bigger picture, it’s easier to identify developing trends, diminishing trends, as well as specific products or features people are searching for – all of which can be valuable information for your development and marketing initiatives.
While Share of Search may not be able to tell you exactly how many searchers become buyers, it still provides ample data and opportunities for your team to seize and innovate upon. Your company can also embark upon targeted SEO initiatives to help improve your Share of Search, thereby potentially driving your organic search numbers up. And more traffic on your site means more potential sales.
Beyond Share of Search, companies can also measure their share of voice – but what is share of voice? Although share of voice and search are often talked about interchangeably or within the same conversation, your company’s share of voice represents your brand’s visibility within the marketplace. In other words, share of voice measures the percentage share a brand possesses within their industry for a marketing channel.
Share of voice SEO is important to businesses because you can assess your company’s current position within the marketplace and make more informed decisions regarding initiatives to grow or improve your organization’s brand recognition. To determine your company’s share of voice, search your brand’s name in a preferred search engine. You can also view searches for your competitors and tangentially related queries to better understand the kinds of things your potential customers are searching for.
There are numerous benefits to calculating and understanding your organization’s share of voice. It’s relatively quicker and simpler to aggregate such information than alternative methods, and if your research is comprehensive enough, your company can ascertain a fairly reliable snapshot of your marketplace’s current situation – who holds what share of the market and how many queries your company nets compared to your competitors.