Share Of Voice SEO: What It Is & How To Improve It

Share of voice SEO measures how much search engines showcase your brand for certain keywords or topics and how much internet users prefer to click on your website instead of other pages they see in SERPs.

Today, when company pages often compete head to head, measuring and improving your share of voice in SERPs is a critical factor for a successful digital marketing strategy.

But let’s start from scratch to get a better understanding of SEO SOV (Share Of Voice).

What Is Share Of Voice SEO?

Share of voice SEO is a crucial metric that estimates your brand awareness based on search engine visibility and rankings. It takes into account specific keywords or topics and evaluates your level of influence (i.e., traffic and clicks) relative to your competitors.

Why Is Share Of Voice SEO Important?

Share of voice SEO (or SEO SOV) helps organizations and SEO pros see top-of-the-funnel data that reflect the effectiveness of their strategy compared to the overall market share and to their competition.

Advertisers use these insights to guide future campaigns. They also use them as popularity indicators.

As your SOV rises, your brand is attracting more attention on SERPs for relevant searches. This, in turn, enhances your online presence and allows you to capture a larger market share.

Why Should Brands Improve Their SEO Share Of Voice?

Any brand that invests in search engine optimization strategies has all the tools at hand to improve its SEO share of voice.

So why not go for it?

Remember that even though SEO campaigns provide extensive data on web pages’ popularity, visibility, and authority, SEO SOV metrics offer a different perspective on your current organic traffic and competitor landscape - helping you to reach more qualified leads.

More importantly, share of voice metrics provide a clear view of where you stand, i.e., the scale of the search traffic pie you’re claiming - by comparing your slice to the whole.

With that in mind, let’s see how to measure the share of voice in SEO.

How To Calculate Share Of Voice SEO?

To calculate your share of voice SEO, you basically need to divide your website’s search traffic by the total search traffic for your specific keywords.

SEO Share Of Voice (SOV) Formula

Here’s the formula to calculate the share of voice in SEO:

(Website’s Organic Search Traffic for Specific Keywords / Total Organic Search Traffic for Specific Keywords) × 100

7 Steps To Measure Your Share Of Voice SEO For Your Keywords

Before adding values to the SOV formula above, you need to extract meaningful data to calculate! This requires you to dig deep into keywords, rankings, and CTRs.

Here's a short step-by-step guide on how to go about it:

1. Identify your key competitors.
2. Select relevant keywords based on comprehensive research.
3. Analyze how you and your competitors rank for those keywords.
4. Take into account the click-through-rates (CTR) of your web pages, as well as those of your competitors.
5. Estimate the traffic for each rank position and for each keyword by multiplying its CTR by its search volume.
6. Combine traffic estimates for your site and your competitors across all keywords.
7. Use the formula: Your estimated traffic / Total estimated traffic = Your SEO Share of Voice

After assessing your new data, you can spot meaningful opportunities to increase your share of voice keywords and topics.

How To Increase Your SEO Share Of Voice And Improve Visibility?

Well, adopting fundamental SEO principles is the key to improving your organic share of voice in search engines.

So, start with the basics.

Improve Your SEO SOV - The Basics

Follow all the core SEO techniques to start building the base for SOV improvements.

1. Start With Keyword Gap Analysis

Because you want to grow your SOV piece of the pie in SERPs, identify keyword and topic gaps between your competitors and you. Jot down your strengths, weaknesses, and untapped keyword opportunities to outperform your rivals.

2. Continue With Keyword Research

Based on your findings, focus on long-tail keywords. These are less competitive queries that can quickly boost your SEO share of voice. Try to select those keywords that are the best match for your target topics.

Finally, create a thoughtful keyword map to plan your targeting strategy. A good way to boost your share of voice faster is to prioritize business-related keywords that match your niche and target audience.

3. Publish High-Quality Content

Always include comprehensive, well-researched content on your website. In fact, it’s better not to include topics where you cannot demonstrate expertise - especially in very competitive niches. Plus, don’t forget to keep all your content fresh and updated.

4. Work Your Way Up With Link-Building

To raise your SEO share of voice, you need to spy on your competitors’ backlinks and outperform them!

Try to get your focus pages referenced in other industry sites or prominent news channels. Moreover, ‘word of mouth’ links in social media and forums bolster your credibility (and thus, your SEO SOV!)

5. Keep Your Website Healthy

Website health is the pillar of SEO. Without a solid ‘base,’ the entire keyword/content construction can easily roll down the SERPs. So, ensure you conduct regular technical SEO audits and fix everything - from site speed to metadata.

Besides these must-dos, more specialized search engine optimization tactics can significantly benefit your share of voice SEO. Here are some more things you can do:

Improve Your SEO SOV - The Next Steps

Just a note here - every digital marketer and every business can leverage different channels and promo techniques to enlarge their share of voice SEO. Some commonly used ways to go about it include:

1. Stay Updated On Algorithm Changes

Keeping up with Google algorithm updates and SEO trends is vital to adapt your SOV strategy and ensure your current metrics are trustworthy.

2. Build Thought Leadership

Establish your brand authority by creating diverse and professional content (along with some more ‘lighter’ pieces, of course.) Publish in-depth guides, case studies, and industry analyses.

Try to broadcast your expertise via industry publications and real-life events, for instance, participating in credible industry events, applying for niche-specific awards, or freely offering your knowledge in non-commercial interviews.

3. Leverage Social Media

Driving traffic to your website via social media is a valuable signal for search engines. It essentially means that your brand is worth that extra bit of attention.

Here again, check how your competitors are doing. Explore who is sharing their content, what’s their audience or favorable influencers. Then, try to make your content more popular in similar (or better!) ways.

4. Engage On Q&A Platforms

Google tends to favor real-world conversations. Q&As on platforms like Quora or Reddit often appear among the top-performing results.

Plus, you get the chance to have your brand mentioned and linked in topically targeted web sources - enhancing your share of voice visibility even further.

5. Analyze Content Format & Structure

Because targeting topic and/or keyword gaps may not be enough, make sure you analyze your competitors’ content.

See what media and format they use. For instance: is it videos, images, graphics? How is their text structured? Long/short paragraphs, FAQs, number, and wording of headings. And what’s the content length?

Then, you can also analyze their website structure and internal linking strategy. Any small detail that works better on other websites can also work better on yours. So, try to make gradual changes and measure what’s working (and what's not!)

6. Finally, Keep Tracking Your Share Of Voice SEO

Regularly monitor how’s your share of voice SEO doing. Use professional tools to measure your progress, spot new competitors, and refine your strategy.

At the end of the day, you can only go forward via testing, trial and error. Or, you may choose to speed up the process with the help of professional marketers.

Talk To SEO SOV Pros

Partnering with an expert SEO agency is the best way to take advantage of all your assets and potential, leveraging the share of voice SEO for your business or your SEO clients.

So, if you need to raise your website’s SOV effectively and solidly, contact one of our SEO experts at Atropos Digital.

Share Of Voice - FAQs

Share of voice is more than an SEO technique. It’s a long-standing marketing approach. It started as a top-of-funnel metric aiming to measure a brand's marketing investment, typically in advertising dollars, compared to that of its competitors.

Here is some more information on different types of SOV in marketing.

What Is Share Of Voice In Marketing?

Share of voice is a marketing metric that compares your brand's visibility against your competitors across different channels like PPC ads, social media, and website traffic. It measures your presence in the market, showing how much of the industry conversation your brand controls.

Share Of Voice Calculation

Today, digital marketers calculate share of voice (SOV) in PPC ads, website traffic (organic share of voice), and social media (social share of voice).

Share Of Voice Analysis

Analyzing your SOV helps you assess which topics and advertising channels to focus on, in order to enlarge your presence in your niche. SOV is correlated to market share in the sense that the greater your market share, the more authority you'll gain in your industry.

Is There A Share Of Voice Calculator?

There are various share of voice calculators available online. However, calculating your SOV is quite simple - the most demanding part is gathering the right statistics. Here’s an example of a SOV formula for social media:

Share of Voice = (Sum of own mentions / Sum of all relevant mentions of all competitors) x 100

You can replace the value 'sum of mentions’ with any other relevant value - depending on the type of SOV you are measuring.

What Does SOV Stand For In Business?

SOV acronym stands for Share of Voice - a marketing measurement that illustrates a business’ popularity and brand awareness within their industry.

What’s The Difference Between Share Of Voice And Share Of Search?

Both share of voice and share of search measure the portion of the market a brand occupies in its industry, relative to its competitors. Share of voice can evaluate paid and organic indicators across the market, while share of search focuses on the volume of organic branded searches over a set period.

How To Calculate Share Of Search?

To calculate the share of search for your brand, you can simply divide the amount of branded searches for your company by the corresponding number of your entire competition together.