What is Share of Voice?
Share of Voice (SOV) in SEO refers to how much visibility your brand has in search results compared to your competitors. In other words, it measures the percentage of organic traffic your site receives for a specific set of keywords relative to the traffic received by competing sites.
How to Calculate the Share of Voice
The share of voice is calculated by dividing the traffic you received for a keyword by the total traffic every other site, including yours, received for the keyword.
Now, most SEO tools cannot evaluate the exact number of visitors a page receives from Google’s search results page. So, they estimate these figures and use them to calculate your share of voice.
For example, the first page of Google typically contains 10 organic links. However, the traffic each of the ten links receives depends on its position on the page. The higher the result, the more traffic it receives.
So, to calculate your share of traffic, these SEO tools estimate how much traffic a site at that position will receive. This will be the traffic assigned to your site for ranking in that position.
The SEO tool then estimates how much traffic a site in every other position, including the one you occupy, will receive. Once done, they divide both together and multiply by 100 to evaluate your share of voice in percentage.
Share of Voice as a Metric
The share of voice (SOV) is not a Google metric. Google does not use or provide it in tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console. Instead, it is evaluated by third-party SEO tools that crawl the web and analyze Google search results pages.
Bloggers and SEOs use the share of voice as a key performance indicator (KPI) to evaluate their visibility on organic results pages. This allows them to set clear SEO goals and measure their SEO performance.
Importance of Share of Voice
Share of voice (SOV) is important in SEO because it directly reflects how visible your website is on organic search results pages relative to your competitors. This allows you to identify and evaluate your strengths and weaknesses.
The higher your share of voice, the more likely users are to find and click on your page on search results pages. This indicates your SEO strategy is working fine, and you are capturing a significant portion of the search traffic for that keyword.
On the other hand, a low share of voice indicates you are not ranking well for that keyword and would need to review the content and competition to understand why you cannot rank for it.