SEO is important for driving organic traffic to your website and growing your digital presence. And while you may have heard about metrics like click-through rates and keyword rankings, share of search is one important metric you might not have heard of.
Now, share of search shouldn’t be confused with share of voice, which is a fairly common metric.
So what exactly is share of searches and why should you be tracking them in 2023?
To help you understand why it’s important for your business, we’ve put together this guide.
Let’s get started.
What is it?
In simple terms, share of search is the volume of search queries for your brand proportionate to searches of all brands in your industry.
Essentially, it’s a measure of how much your audience searches for your brand versus all others in the industry.
It’s a great way to understand how impactful your SEO efforts are as you can see how you perform vis-a-vis your competitors. At the same time, it shows how strong your brand is online as the metric measures your branded searches.
This metric is different from both share of voice and market share. While the former indicates how well your brand awareness has spread, the latter deals with your revenue as a percentage of market revenue.
Share of search, on the other hand, very specifically deals with search engines.
Reasons to Track Share of Search
Share of search is an important metric that helps you understand how successful your SEO and branding strategies are. Some of the reasons why you should track it regularly are:
1. Competitive Analysis
By tracking your share of search, you can figure out how well your brand awareness stacks up against competitors when it comes to search engines.
It can also play a critical role in helping you identify your major competitors who share a similar share of search.
Using share of search, you can also determine how well your SEO strategies have worked at increasing your search volume.
For instance, if you have an online course platform, you can compare your branded searches with those of other course platforms.
2. AI Technology
AI technology is a transformative tool that helps marketers to boost their digital marketing ROI.
With the help of AI SEO tools, marketers creating quality content, competitor analysis, automating content publishing such as internal linking, add structured data and other required tasks.
To Track and automate your daily search performance you can subscribe to a AI SEO tool or you can develop your own AI seo tool. You can choose best artificial intelligence development services to developing an AI SEO tool to automate all SEO related tasks.
3. Search Trends
If you want to understand how your brand has performed organically over a given period of time, you should consider measuring your share of search.
By tracking your share of search regularly, you can figure out if it’s steadily increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same. You can accordingly tweak your SEO and branding strategies.
For instance, you could start guest posting on multiple sites and use branded anchors. These Attrock curated list of best guest posting sites can help you get started.
4. Keyword Strategy
By tracking share of search, you can also figure out how well your keyword strategy is paying off. You can see which keywords are driving the most traffic to your website and the competition on those keywords as well.
Accordingly, you can tweak your keyword strategy and content to improve your share of search. You could also double down on branded keywords in your off-page SEO strategy.
5. Market Expansion
When you intend to expand into a new market, tracking share of search can pay rich dividends. Right from the moment you start working on your SEO in the region, you can start measuring your share of search.
It will help you identify the most significant players in that market.
By measuring the share of search over a time period, you’ll be able to determine how well your brand has penetrated in the market on local search.
You can accordingly implement different strategies like creating videos using YouTube video editing software and adding them to your website.
How to Track Share of Searches
Now that you know about the importance of it, let’s try to understand how you can go about tracking it.
At the outset, calculating your share of search is easy. Just find out the number of searches your brand has received versus the number of searches in your industry.
But how exactly can you find these numbers?
That’s where Google Trends comes in.
Google Trends is perhaps the best tool for tracking your share of search. The tool shows you keyword search volumes over time.
While the search volumes won’t be exact and would instead show up in a chart where they’re distributed between 0 to 100, it’s a great way to get a high level understanding of your share of search.
So, how can you go about the process?
Start by entering your brand name.
Next, enter the names of about 4-6 prime competitors in your industry that you know of. Finally, set the region and duration.
You’ll see a chart showing how your share of search fluctuates over time.
Here’s an example of Slack.
Image via Google Trends
To identify the share of search, you can pick the number for Slack and then divide it by the sum of the traffic of all competitors (including Slack itself). It’ll give you a percentage figure, which is the share of search for Slack.
But Google Trends isn’t the only tool you can use. If you prefer to dig deeper, you can use a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs as well.
For instance, on Semrush, you can head to the Keyword Overview tool and enter names of your brand and competitors.
It’ll give you the search volumes for each. All you have to do is manually sum them up and divide yours by the total to get the share of search.
Wrapping It Up: Share of Search
Like share of voice and market share, it’s important to measure your share of search to understand how well your brand building and SEO efforts are helping your organic growth.
By tracking it over a span of time, you can even determine if your efforts are leading to improving results or need to be overhauled.
It’s also a great way to see if you’re making inroads into new markets on search engines.
The best part is that you can get a good overview of your share of search through a free tool like Google Trends.
So, go ahead and start tracking your share of searches to see your brand script its growth story on organic search. And if you have any questions, ask them in the comments section below.
Share of Search: What is it and Why is it Important?
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