Increasing the visibility of websites in search engines: practices and recommendations

Surely every business representative who has their own website knows how important it is to ensure its high positions in search results. This is a guarantee that your portal will be in full view of the target audience, people will visit it en masse, and orders will be placed. This is your chance to get ahead of competitors, attract the attention of buyers to your products, good terms of cooperation. We have already paid a lot of attention to such an issue as website promotion in search engines in our reviews. Today's material will be somewhat similar, but it is aimed not at increasing the position of the site, but at improving its visibility. This is what will help ensure more effective promotion for sites that operate in highly competitive niches.

In particular, we will tell you in detail about what is the visibility of a site in search engines, how to calculate and check it. We will highlight a number of factors that have a direct impact on this parameter. Let's consider the main mistakes that prevent resources from providing good visibility. We will provide a short checklist, using which you can perform the upcoming work as consistently and correctly as possible.

What is the visibility of a site in search?

Such an indicator as the visibility of a site in a search engine indicates the frequency of the appearance of a certain page of a resource in the search results for key queries, as well as its position. It turns out that the higher this parameter is, the higher the probability of attracting organic traffic. And this means that the number of clients on your site will increase. By and large, website visibility can rightfully be called one of the key indicators in determining the effectiveness of a launched SEO strategy.

If you are sure that this parameter shows stable growth, then you can confidently say that your strategy is working well, that the site appears stably and often in search results. But if at some point it turns out that visibility has begun to decline, then it is time to make the appropriate adjustments. Perhaps it is necessary to perform technical optimization, replace the content on the site, work on external links or review other issues that hinder the full development of your site.

Monitoring the visibility of the site is important for absolutely any business, because many other aspects depend on this parameter, namely:

• Increasing targeted traffic to the site. Sites that are at the top of the search results for the most common search queries inspire more trust in the audience. It is on them that much more orders are placed.
• Increasing recognition. Thanks to good visibility, your site will always be in front of people, which in itself will help the general audience to remember your brand perfectly.
• Formation of good indicators of trust among the audience. Buyers will perceive your site as reliable, authoritative, will use its services themselves and recommend it to their friends.
• Minimization of advertising costs. Compared to paid ads, organic traffic is completely free for business. At the same time, its effectiveness is mostly several times higher than that of the same contextual advertising and other paid promotion.

But, in order to ensure all this in practice, it is important to implement the idea as correctly as possible. And here, first of all, you need to understand how the visibility of the site is measured. Only in this way will you be able to perform the appropriate calculations, compare the indicators with the previous ones, determining the dynamics of the site's development.

Calculating website visibility correctly

Website visibility is a parameter that is measured in percentages and depends directly on the main indicators:

1. Frequency of search queries covering the website. This parameter can be easily determined in any search engine thanks to special tools. In particular, for Google this will be the Keyword Planner service, built directly into Google Ads, and for Yandex - Yandex Wordstat.
2. Website position in search results. This indicator is also determined using specialized services or manually. In the latter case, you will need to go into incognito mode, and then manually enter the relevant queries in the search and mark the position.

Now we want to draw your attention directly to the visibility coefficient. So, for sites that occupy 1-3 place in search results it will be equal to 1, 4 place - 0.85, 5 place - 0.6, 6-7 places - 0.5, 8-9 places - 0.3, 10 place - 0.2, 11-15 places - 0.1, 16-20 places - 0.05, 21 place and below - 0. From this we can draw one simple conclusion: sites that are below 20th position in search results remain invisible to the audience, that is, the chances of successful work in the market here will be minimal.

Once you have both of these parameters at your disposal, you will need to multiply the visibility coefficient by the request frequency, then divide by the request frequency and multiply the resulting figure by 100%. We would like to draw your attention to the fact that in order to obtain the most complete and clear picture, it will be necessary to measure the coefficients and frequency for each request. As a result, it is necessary to divide the sum of all coefficients multiplied by the frequency by the sum of all frequencies and again multiply by 100%.

As an example, we can give a small calculation here. Let's assume that we are talking about an online store that supplies children's products to the market. For the keyword "buy a soft toy", it is in 3rd position in the search results (the coefficient is 1), and the number of requests per month is 700. The same site for the query "buy an educational toy for babies" is in 5th position in the search results (the coefficient is 0.6), its frequency is 300.

Now the calculation: ((1x700+0.6x300)/(700+300))x100%=0.88x100=88%. This means that for these two queries, your site's visibility is 88%. This indicator can rightfully be considered quite good. These are the numbers that sites should strive for.

Checking the site's visibility in search engines

The manual calculation that we provided above allows you to get fairly accurate and reliable results. But it is convenient to use it only if you are promoting a small number of queries. If there are a lot of keys, then calculating all this manually is quite difficult. And here specialized services will come to the rescue:

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• Yandex Webmaster. With its help, you can track the visibility of the site for a large number of queries and pages. Initially, you need to add your site to this service, and then go to the statistics section. Select an option such as “Efficiency”, and then ““Monitoring queries”. Here, you will be presented with the dynamics of the site's visibility over the past 2 months, both for individual pages and for specific queries. Here, such parameters as the number of impressions, transitions, key frequency, search results position, and CTR are indicated. Analysis of this data will allow you to understand how often users saw your site in search results.
• Google Search Console. A similar service, but only for the Google search engine. Here you can see not only organic transitions to the site, but also the errors that were made during site optimization and hinder its effective development. To use it, you will need to add your site to this service, confirm the relevant rights, and then go to the "Efficiency" tab and select the "Search results" option here. The information here will be provided in the form of infographics and a detailed report containing information on the number of clicks on the site, the place in the search results for a specific request, the number of clicks and a number of other parameters.

In this case, it is important to pay attention not only to the visibility indicators themselves, but also to the dynamics of these figures. The fact is that without this, you will not be able to understand whether your site is developing, whether it is attracting new customers. But a decrease in visibility can also be noticed by external signs. In particular, this may be a drop in organic traffic, a decrease in sales. And here it is also important to understand why this is happening. This is the only way you can find the best ways to solve the problem.

The main parameters that affect the visibility of sites in search results

We would like to immediately draw your attention to the fact that only comprehensive website optimization can ensure high visibility in search engines. This means that to implement such an idea, it will be necessary to carefully work out the semantics itself, perform technical optimization, and make adjustments to a number of external and internal factors. Now we will consider all these nuances in detail, but we would like to say right away that you cannot do without a comprehensive approach. If you miss even one point, you will not be able to achieve the desired results. You can identify problem areas on the site during its technical audit.

Site semantics

Anyone who has encountered website promotion knows how important it is to correctly form a semantic core and fill the site with key queries. Here you will find the following recommendations useful:

• bet on those keywords that your closest successful competitors are using to promote themselves;
• the basis of your core should be not only high-frequency, but also low-frequency queries, because they provide the highest conversion rates;
• in order to expand the core, you can also use special search suggestions, association phrases, as well as additional words that more broadly reveal the topic;
• the received queries will need to be clustered by topic, creating separate landing pages for each received group: thanks to this, you will exclude subsequent competition between different pages of your site for the same queries;
• if we are talking about a local business, then it will be useful to use geo-queries: the main keys, to which the location will be added directly, for example, “buy clothes for children in Moscow”.

To ensure the widest possible coverage of the user audience, it is recommended to combine informational and commercial queries. This is what will allow you to attract people to the site who just want to learn more about your products or services, as well as those who are already ready to make a purchase.

We would also like to draw attention to the fact that the semantic core constantly needs to be adjusted. The queries that were interesting to your customers yesterday may not be entered by them at all today. Therefore, it is recommended to check the relevance of the semantics at least once every six months and, if necessary, replace irrelevant keywords with new ones.

Also, do not forget about seasonality and trends. It is clear that the number of people who will buy swimsuits or sunscreen in winter will be significantly lower than those who will be interested in warm accessories. Don't forget about trends: as soon as a mention of some fashionable trend gets into the reviews of bloggers, it will be picked up en masse by the audience of its subscribers, and along with them, many other users.

Fill the site with quality content

One of the mandatory elements in the formation of good visibility of the site can rightfully be called its quality and relevant content. It should fully correspond to the topic of the page and what a person who visits your site expects to see. If people linger on your site, perform certain target actions on it, the system will perceive this as evidence of usefulness, value, which in itself will contribute to an increase in positions in the search results.

A completely opposite effect can be observed on pages that the audience leaves quickly enough. This is relevant for pages with outdated, incompetent information copied from third-party resources. In this case, bad behavioral factors are evidence for the search engine that this page does not satisfy user requests. Accordingly, a decision will be made to lower the position of such a site.

As additional recommendations for working with content, you can give the following:

• Create a separate page on your site where you will post useful materials. This is what will allow you to provide fairly good traffic from organic search. Informational requests are always better promoted than commercial ones. This means that with their help you can provide yourself with a fairly good increase in audience. Moreover, in such articles you can add useful information about the products presented in the product catalog, including recommendations for their use, selection. In parallel with this, you can also include links to the products themselves in articles, which will help redirect potential buyers directly to the product catalog.
• Make adjustments to the headings, as well as meta tags. These solutions will help increase clickability in search results. You must add key queries here, as well as set out in tags the main essence of all the material that will be posted on the page. Thanks to this, bots will be able to understand how much your material meets the needs of the audience, and the users themselves, without even visiting the site, will appreciate its usefulness for themselves.
• Add multimedia elements to your pages. In this case, we are talking about videos, pictures, graphs, diagrams and everything that will make your material more visual and easy to perceive. Moreover, along with increasing the involvement of the target audience, these actions will also have a positive effect on the behavioral factors of the search engines themselves. Pictures and photos will allow you, among other things, to advance in additional search engine result blocks, such as "Video", "Pictures".
• Always analyze the intent of the key request. Modern search engines constantly pay attention to how much the material posted on your site corresponds to user requests. That is, initially you need to study the top ten search results for each of your requests and see what types of materials are presented here in the majority: reviews, informational articles, manuals, product catalogs, etc. Accordingly, what will be presented more widely, you need to place on your site.
• Pay attention to the quality of the content itself. It must meet high requirements in terms of experience, expertise, authority, and reliability. This means that it is important for you to add links to trusted sources in your publications, indicate the author, and present the material in the most structured and accessible way. And, of course, everything that is published on the site must be absolutely reliable. Otherwise, any person who understands the issue will be able to convict you of incompetence, which will negatively affect the site's rating and the reputation of your business as a whole.

Improving the technical performance of the site

In this case, we are talking about such parameters as loading speed, resource adaptability to mobile devices, the presence of an SSL certificate, sitemap and robots.txt file, as well as identifying errors in the code. So, if the loading speed of your resource is very low, then users are highly likely not to wait, but will go to your competitors. Responsiveness has also become the norm these days, as a large number of people surf the Internet directly from their mobile devices. It is also important that your site meets the security standard, as indicated by the presence of an SSL certificate. It is also important to provide a sitemap and add a robots.txt file so that bots can perform high-quality and fast indexing of the resource, identify and eliminate errors in the code that can provoke failures in the site's operation.

So, in order to increase the visibility of the site, you will need to do the following work:

• increase the loading speed by optimizing the image size, reducing the weight of scripts, adding data caching;
• set up correct indexing of pages, closing everything unnecessary through the robots.txt file;
• adapt the resource to different devices, using the appropriate layout and design;
• check the validity of the site code, eliminate problems that interfere with its full operation;
• create a sitemap, adding it to both Yandex Webmaster and Google Search Console for faster indexing of updated and new pages.

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that a technical audit of the site should be performed regularly. This is the only way to identify problems at the stage of their occurrence and immediately eliminate them, preventing deterioration of visibility in search.

Improving the structure of the site

A well-thought-out and competently built site structure is what will allow the user to navigate the pages as easily and quickly as possible, find the goods, services, and information they need. The lack of internal interlinking has a fairly serious impact on the visibility of the site. If you do not add links leading to other sections of your site, then the viewing depth and time spent on the site will significantly decrease. In addition, with the help of interlinking, you can distribute the weight between pages as accurately as possible. That is, such an opportunity should clearly not be neglected.

Another serious problem that can also be attributed to the structure of the site is unoptimized tags. You should understand that the title and description will be displayed in the snippet in any case. If in practice it turns out that they are unattractive, if they lack key queries, then the clickability may ultimately be very low.

It is also very important to provide a correct hierarchy on the site. The structure itself should be as consistent and logical as possible. This will be useful not only for people, but also for search bots, complicating the orientation on the site itself.

To improve visibility in this case, it is necessary:

• Add swipes to the mobile version of the site, allowing you to scroll through, finger movements to enlarge or reduce images. All links and buttons should be as easy as possible to press with a finger. The top of the page should have a menu that users can open by clicking if needed.
• It is important to place CTA buttons in a visible place, making them contrasting with the base background.
• Make the feedback form as simple as possible with a minimum of fields, so that people don’t have to spend a lot of time filling it out.
• Use clear fonts for the text, add headings, paragraphs, lists, and pictures. The color of the letters and background should contrast well.
• It’s better to remove advertising and intrusive pop-up windows altogether, as they can cover the main content and make the user’s work as inconvenient as possible.

The recommendations are simple, but they guarantee improved visibility of the site and will enhance the user experience.

Checking external links leading to the site

An important indicator in promoting a site and improving its visibility in search engines will be the presence of backlinks on third-party sites, including social networks and the media. Search bots perceive good links from authoritative and similar resources as recognition of value. To get a good external link mass, use the following tips:

• pay special attention to the quality of the sites that you plan to use as donors;
• link mass should be collected as systematically, consistently, without sudden increases, that is, naturally;
• distribute all the link mass evenly across the pages of your site, do not allow all the links to lead to one page;
• use different types of anchors: keywords, brand names, common phrases, URLs;
• combine different types of links: dofollow, nofollow, UGC, which will make the resulting mass as natural as possible.

You can use different solutions to collect external link mass. One option is guest posting, which involves posting materials in the media, your own blog. You can also use crowd marketing by answering audience questions on social networks, creating comments on articles. In this case, the main thing is that everything looks as natural as possible. You can also start interlinking between your own projects, add materials to catalogs and directories. In some cases, natural links from social networks can be a good option, since they not only attract traffic, but also help increase recognition. That is, they can be a pretty good source of leads.

But in any case, the main thing here is not to overdo it. It is important to build linkbuilding so that your link mass looks as natural as possible for the system.

Checking behavioral factors

During the indexing of site pages and determining what position they should occupy in search results, bots necessarily analyze the process of user interaction with the resource. They pay attention to the bounce rate, that is, what percentage of people leave the site literally immediately after entering. If this figure is high, then there is some problem on the page: irrelevant content, low loading speed, poorly thought-out interface, etc. The total time users spend on the site is also taken into account. It is believed that the more time a person spends on it, the more useful and interesting information they find here. Bots also pay attention to the viewing depth, that is, how many pages a person has studied in one visit. Low indicators indicate poor navigation, lack of interlinking.

To increase the visibility of the site, we recommend taking the following measures:

• Identify what prevents users from spending a lot of time on the site. It is important to understand which pages people leave most often and for what reason. This is the only way to eliminate errors as quickly as possible.
• Present information on the site in a structured manner. The main pages should be no more than 1-2 clicks away from the main page. For more convenient navigation, add breadcrumbs.
• All important buttons, whether CTA, feedback form, contacts, should be placed in a place on the work screen that is constantly visible.
• Make adjustments to the content, making it interesting and easy to perceive. Add structure, video, pictures where appropriate. In the product card itself, add the ability to add reviews, information about the rating, delivery, payment features.
• Review the internal linking, linking together pages that can interest the audience. Add collections of similar materials under the articles or product cards.

Thanks to such transformations, you will be able to make your site as convenient as possible for users, which will improve their experience, and at the same time, increase visibility in search engines.

CTR in search

CTR in search is another factor that has a direct impact on the visibility of the site. The system sees that your resource is at the top of the search results, but people do not visit it or leave it too quickly. The system will perceive this as a signal of inconsistency with the request, low-quality content. As a result, the position occupied with great effort is lost, the site goes down. To prevent this, do the following:

• Write a high-quality Title and Description, add information and attractiveness to them. They must contain key phrases.
• Add a favicon, i.e. a website icon, which will subsequently be displayed in the search results in the snippet next to the page name itself.
• Enable micro-markup, which will allow you to add the price, rating, reviews and other elements to the snippet.

You must understand that the audience pays special attention to the snippet. The more attractive it turns out to be in the end, the more people will go to your site, which will have a positive effect on its visibility.

Checking and making adjustments to local ranking factors

By local ranking factors, we mean those points that the search engine pays special attention to when determining the position of a resource in accordance with geo-dependent queries. All this will be relevant for local businesses, that is, companies that have physical offices, cafes, restaurants, shops, beauty salons and other points of sale operating in a specific region. For such businesses, optimization for local search is a must-have aspect that allows you to increase visibility directly in your region.

To implement such an idea, you need to:

• add your company to Google and Yandex maps;
• add the site to local directories and catalogs, choosing those that will be relevant for your industry;
• optimize the site for local search by adding appropriate mentions of the city, region in the text itself, its headings, meta tags, URL address.

That is, in this case, you will need to take all those measures that will increase the visibility of your site directly in the local environment - where your business is represented territorially.

Errors that often reduce the visibility of the site

If you analyze all the errors that owners make when working with their resources, then the following factors most often have a negative impact on the visibility of the site in search results:

1. The presence of duplicate pages. In the case when your site contains the same versions of pages, search engines will not be able to figure out which of them is the main one. As a result, their position in the search results is blurred, which leads to a decrease in visibility. Most often, such a problem appears as a result of having several versions with and without www, http and https, incorrect assignment of the URL address, and even the features of a number of CMS that automatically generate several links to the same material at once. To fix this error, set up a 301 redirect to the main page, highlight the priority URL using the tag, and set restrictions on the corresponding parameters in the robots.txt file.
2. Excessive saturation with key queries. In this case, we are talking about such a moment as overspam. It occurs when a large number of key phrases are added to the page, pursuing the goal of increasing visibility in search engines. The site perceives such actions as an attempt at deception. Moreover, all this is detected quite quickly today. If we talk directly about the Yandex search engine, then such an algorithm as "Baden-Baden" is actively used here. To prevent this, it is necessary to carefully check the materials before publishing in specialized services. If it turns out that the density of keys is higher than 3-4%, then they should be reviewed, some should be deleted or replaced with synonyms, LSI phrases.
3. Cannibalization of keywords. This happens when you add the same queries to different pages. As a result, they start competing with each other, causing instability in search results. To fix this error, you will need to analyze the entire content of the site, including title, description. headings, removing the same key queries. In some cases, you may have to remove the entire page or merge it with another. Setting up a redirect from secondary pages to the main page will also be a useful solution here.

Keep an eye on the materials you post on your pages, because this is the easiest and most effective way to ensure the high quality of the site as a whole. And this is – the key to its high position in search engine results.

Let's sum it up

To summarize everything we talked about in today's review, here's a short checklist that you can follow to ensure excellent visibility of your site in search engine results:

• use specialized services, such as Webmaster or Google Search Console, to measure current visibility indicators;
• collect an extended semantic core, adding not only high-frequency, but also mid-frequency, low-frequency queries, cluster them and distribute them across relevant pages;
• analyze the content on your site, determine its technical indicators, behavioral factors, take into account spam indicators and make appropriate adjustments;
• optimize the title, description, headings H1-H6, add microdata, connect SSL certificate to ensure high security;
• set up robots.txt and sitemap.xml, showing search bots which pages should be indexed;
• make sure to improve page loading speed, optimize them for different devices, add interlinking for more convenient and fast navigation;
• work on increasing the external link mass, promote your page through forums, social networks, blog, optimize the site for local search;
• publish content that will be interesting to your audience, replace outdated irrelevant information with new, dilute the text with infographics, pictures, videos, if appropriate, add reviews, feedback buttons, online chat.

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