Get Your Search Marketing Visibility Score™
Use the first-ever comprehensive SEM rating system to grade & improve your presence
Does your search marketing get an A or an F?
Get graded and find out how you’re performing! The Search Marketing Visibility Score™ (SMVS™) is a measure of a company’s search presence across the entire results page—Paid, Organic, and Product Listing Ads (PLA)—adjusted for the company’s specific competition. The Search Monitor created the SMVS by combining its daily ad monitoring data for millions of keywords and thousands of companies with a weighting system indicating a company’s likelihood to receive a click given its competitors’ presence.
Why Do I Need It?
A company’s search strategy is more effective when it generates multiple listings for the same query. But it’s not just about quantity of listings. The listings must rank high in each section to encourage searchers to trust a company and click on its links. However, a single search presence score covering the entire results page has been elusive due to:
- Three different data sources for paid, organic, and PLA, with slightly different metrics for each
- Data often being managed by three different departments within the same company.
- A lack of competitive adjustment in the data (example: Is five page appearances good or bad? Depends on your competitors’ performance)
- Difficulties in updating this data daily, drilling down to a specific city or country, and adjusting score for thousands of keywords or dozens of new competitors
The SMVS brings paid, organic, and PLA together into one easy-to-measure metric that forces search marketers to look at the results page holistically—which is exactly how searchers see it.
Benefits of the Search Marketing Visibility Score
- Learn About Current Competitors: The new SMVS lets any search marketer see their relative score versus current competitors
- Identify New Competitors: Running an SMVS report also identifies unknown threats or industry entrants
- Pinpoint Areas for Improvement: For the Paid, Organic, and PLA sections, the SMVS helps you review your performance and compare it to that of each competitor. This information is crucial for budgeting and resource allocation since a search manager can decide where to focus their efforts and devote their next dollar to maximize their total SEM presence
- Justify PPC Spend Decisions: The SMVS provides search marketers at brands or their agencies with the evidence they need to increase spend (to be more competitive), maintain current spend levels, or re-allocate budgets between Paid, Organic, and PLA.
How The Search Marketing Visibility Score Is Created
- The Search Monitor performs daily monitoring of paid ads, organic listings, and PLA units for millions of keywords and every major US city, country, engine and native language.
- For each SERP section (Paid, Organic, PLA), The Search Monitor combines ad appearances with ranking data. This is done daily for every search advertiser and each of its competitors.
- The Search Monitor then applies a proprietary weighting and scoring algorithm to produce the SMVS. The calculations comes from 8 years of experience monitoring the relationship between ads and clicks, and from daily discussions with the company’s 2,000+ search marketing clients.
See your Search Marketing Visibility Score by requesting a demo for your specific set of keywords and competitors. What gets measured gets managed!