What is Share of Voice (SoV) in SEO?

There are roughly 600 million blogs on the Internet, with a cumulative of 6 million published daily. 

This particular search query, ‘share of voice in SEO,’ has over 125 million results on Google: 

And over 10 million on Bing: 

In modern SEO, brand growth is more than just being seen. According to Google, online consumers read reviews, make inquiries on social media, and engage in other exploration activities before purchasing. It looks something like this:

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So the question is, are they endorsing your brand? 

This is where the share of voice (SoV) comes in. 

Like other vital SEO metrics, SoV gives insights into the impact of your brand marketing strategy and measures the level of influence you have compared to your competitors. 

Here, you’ll learn the importance of SoV for your business, how to calculate your brand SoV, and our top recommendations to improve it.

What is Share of Voice (SoV)?

Share of Voice (SoV) is a digital marketing and advertising metric that measures a brand’s or product’s visibility in a specific niche, market, or industry. 

This metric is used in four primary channels: PPC, Social Media, SEO, and Media: 

• PPC share of voice measures your ad’s visibility, focusing on your Google Ads’ impression share. 
• SEO share of voice, our focus in this guide, assesses your brand’s organic search visibility against competitors. 
• Social media share of voice tracks your brand mentions in consumer conversations. It tells you how many discussions or noise your brand generates on media platforms. 
• Media share of voice measures your brand mentions in blogs and news. It helps you see who’s talking about your brand and competitors and how to tailor your strategies accordingly. 

By measuring your SoV across these channels, you’ll gain insights into your overall brand’s visibility and identify areas of improvement.

Share of Voice in Marketing vs. Share of Voice in SEO

SoV in marketing and SoV in SEO are similar as they measure your brand awareness compared to your competitors in the same industry or vertical. But they have slight differences. 

In marketing, SoV evaluates your brand awareness on different marketing channels compared to your competitors in the same market. It also measures the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and helps you build targeted marketing strategies to enhance brand recognition.

Have you ever thought about how visible your website is when people search for specific keywords or themes? This is where the concept of SEO Share of Voice comes into play. By tracking keyword rankings, you can determine your website’s Share of Voice metric, which tells you how many clicks you and your competitors are likely to get. This is valuable information that can help you improve your website’s visibility and surpass your competition.

Think of Share of Voice as your portion of the market pie. Are you getting a big slice, or just a tiny piece? By understanding your Share of Voice, you can make informed decisions about how to improve your website’s performance and capture more clicks. So don’t ignore this important metric.

Why Does SoV Matter in SEO?

SoV helps to analyze the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns as it reflects your site’s visibility and performance on SERPs compared to your competitors. If your SoV increases, your brand is gaining more attention on the SERPs for relevant search queries. 

The insights gotten from SoV can be used to inform your future campaigns. This, in turn, can boost your online presence and capture a larger market share.

Benefits of Tracking SoV in SEO

Tracking Share of Voice (SoV) in SEO offers many advantages for your business:

• Realtime Competitor Analysis: 

SoV enables you to benchmark your SEO performance against competitors to identify opportunities and gaps you can leverage for growth. 

For instance, if you notice a sudden decline in your SEO’s SoV during a specific period, you can quickly investigate the reasons behind the drop. For example, your competitor creating a more informative piece than yours can be one of the many reasons for the drop.

By understanding where your brand stands in comparison, you can identify areas for improvement and refine your SEO strategies accordingly.

• Improve brand growth potential: 

SoV also gives a clear picture of how much attention your brand gets. It shows: 

• Where you currently are in terms of SEO performance
• How many people know your brand 
• How they found you online, and
• How often they talk about you with their network 

In addition, it helps you recognize your brand’s growth and expansion opportunities.

• To inform other marketing strategies

Tracking SoV enables you to optimize your marketing strategies more effectively. You can use insights from SoV tracking to tailor your content to your customer preferences. 

For example, an SoV report can reveal the exact search queries driving your brand’s visibility (and competitors). This can be a piece garnering lots of shares on social media. This way, you can make data-driven decisions that’ll skyrocket your SEO return on investment (ROI).  

Calculating Share of Voice in SEO: The Basics

The general formula for calculating Share of Voice is: 

Share of voice = Your brand metrics / Total market metrics x 100

For calculating SoV in SEO:

Brand’s Organic Search Traffic for Specific Keywords/Total Organic Search Traffic for Specific Keywords × 100

For example, assume you have  a brand named ‘kidsline,’ and you want to track your SoV for the keyword ‘Baby cloth rack.’ After research, you got the following results: 

• Total organic search for ‘kidsline baby cloth rack’ is 10,000 visits 
• The total organic search traffic for ‘baby cloth rack’ is 100,000

Your brand SoV for that particular search query will be: 

SoV: 10,000/100,000 * 100

SoV = 10%

However, here are some vital components you need to be familiar with when calculating SoV in SEO;

1. Total Search Volume: This is the aggregate number of searches for a specific keyword or set of keywords over a period. 

2. Your Impressions: These are the number of times your website or content appears in search engine results for specific keywords. It indicates how often users see your site.

3. Competitors’ Impressions: This is the number of times your competitors’ websites or content appear in search results for your target keywords.

​Advanced Metrics and Considerations in SoV Calculations

In more advanced Share of Voice (SoV) analysis, it’s vital to integrate keyword value and traffic for a comprehensive understanding of your brand’s SEO performance. 

This helps you analyze the relevance of specific keywords for the industry and how they contribute to your overall site traffic and engagement.

Also, analyzing vital user behavior metrics like click-through rates and time spent on the website helps you understand audience preferences to optimize your web content accordingly.

Lastly, measuring specific factors related to your industry, such as seasonal changes and trends, is crucial. 

These factors work in tandem to help you better understand your market position and improve your SEO strategy.

Tools and Platforms to Measure SoV in SEO

Getting data and calculating share of voice may be challenging, but you’ll find plenty of SEO tools to help you gather the information you need. Here are the top two:

1. SEMrush

SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that you can use to measure the SoV of your SEO strategy. 

With the ‘Position Tracking’ tool, you can collect daily data on your target keyword(s) and see how they compare in real-time: 

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Or by location, no matter the country, state, or zip code: 

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You also get a sneak peek at your competitor’s strategy through the ‘Competitors Discovery’ report. You’ll see your top competitors based on the SoV of your primary keyword: 

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However, you need a business subscription to access all its usable features. 

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the top tools for gauging SEO share of voice. 

It displays rich data of your website SoV in the ‘Overview tab’: 

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In just one click, you’ll also see your performance as opposed to your competitors:  

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Setting Up and Interpreting Data

After choosing your preferred tool, it’s time to set up conversion metrics to track the relevant data. 

The best part is that all the tools outlined above don’t just collect data but also interpret it to help you make informed decisions. 

For example, SEMrush has built-in data collection tools, which can be exported and organized in an Excel sheet. This way, it’s easier to identify and analyze key performance indicators that move the needle in the bottom line. 

You can also identify emerging trends, areas of improvement, and opportunities to outperform your competitors and acquire more digital real estate. 

Common Pitfalls and Misunderstandings in SoV Analysis

Most SEOs consider SoV a standalone metric when analyzing the brand market share. 

While it’s a vital metric for assessing brand visibility, it provides a limited view of the overall brand performance in isolation. 

For instance, focusing only on keyword rankings and ignoring other vital metrics like website traffic or customer engagement can result in misinterpretations of data.

Solution: Combine SoV with other metrics such as customer feedback, conversion rates, and the revenue generated from organic search. 

Other common pitfalls are: 

• Misinterpreting trends and outliers. For example, a sudden increase in website traffic is mistakenly attributed to an effective SEO campaign rather than a seasonal trend. This can lead to misinformed strategies and resource allocation.

Solution: Segment data based on periods (e.g., monthly, quarterly, or biannually) and seasonal trends. This can help you identify the traffic fluctuations and how to capitalize on the peak periods.   

• Assuming that a higher SoV always indicates success. For instance, if you’re tracking 13 target keywords, 9 of your keywords have a search volume of 20 monthly searches, and the remaining keywords have 2,000 monthly searches. 

Ranking first in the nine keywords with only 20 monthly searches each and having no rank on the remaining keywords with 2,000 monthly searches will result in high SoV.

However, this metric can be misleading because you’re not ranking for relevant keywords that’ll drive more traffic to your site. 

Solution: Look beyond the SoV and traffic and focus on how each keyword impacts your bottom line. This may require creating a list of golden keywords to track for your SoV. 

• Ignoring your customers. Keep in mind that the foundation of any successful SEO strategy is customer-centricity. Focusing on increasing your SoV while ignoring your customer needs will only end in futility. 

Solution: Google advises that: 

Also, integrate customer feedback and sentiment analysis to understand how they influence your brand’s online presence.  

Strategic Recommendations to Improve SEO SoV

To enhance your SEO Share of Voice (SoV), here are strategic recommendations:

1. Content Expansion and Quality

Create high-quality, relevant, comprehensive content that resonates with your target audience. Remember, customer-centricity is critical. Instead of publishing short guides, create expansive content that comprehensively addresses user problems on your page. 

Here’s how: 

• Since SoV in SEO measures your brand visibility on the SERPs, ensure your content is optimized for users first and then search engines. Don’t ignore the basics. Infuse relevant keywords and prioritize those with weighty search visibility, i.e., the one that guarantees more visibility on the SERPs.  
• Keep your content up-to-date at all times. This satisfies Google’s ‘Content Freshness’ update while giving you another chance to rank for your primary keywords.
• Ensure your content is mobile-optimized, readable, and visually appealing. This makes it easier for your readers and search engine bots as they crawl and index your page. 

Read more on how to create high-quality content. 

2. Building Thought Leadership

This year, Google added Expertise to the content ranking guidelines – Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. 

And what’s a better way to display your business expertise and dominate the SERPs than publishing thought leadership content? 

Luckily, there are several avenues to do this: 

• Create in-depth guides, white papers, industry analyses, or case studies
• Share your expert opinions on relevant social media channels and industry publications. I did the same by sharing my expertise on Search Engine Journal: 

• Apply for industry awards in your niche. This is exactly what we did at HigherVisibility. Now, we have several industry-relevant awards that boost our credibility: 

3. Harnessing User Engagement and Social Signals

Focus on engaging your audience by creating a user-friendly website design and social media activity. The more users interact with and share your content on social platforms, the better your SEO Share of Voice.

4. Technical SEO

Optimize your website speed, mobile-friendliness, and metadata. A technical-SEO-friendly website improves user experience and search engine rankings, contributing to a higher SoV.

5. Backlinks

Build a strong backlink profile by getting quality and relevant backlinks from authoritative websites. Backlinks enhance your website’s credibility and can significantly impact your SoV.

Read more on how to improve your website visibility. 

In closing

Boosting your SEO share of voice doesn’t have to be complicated or intimidating.

By committing to the above practices, you’ll gain a competitive edge, increase brand visibility, attract more customers, and become a top voice in your industry. 

Need help? Talk to our consultants today and let us put together a customized strategy for your business.