How to measure successful visibility for SEO in 2024
From rank #1 to SERP features and Gemini.
Visibility, along with organic traffic, is one of the most straightforward ways to measure the results of your SEO efforts, however, defining successful visibility has become more and more difficult in 2024. Our Senior Digital Expert, Gracia Novoa, is sharing her take on the SEO landscape, and how to react to AI shaking up the SERP.
What is visibility?
To understand the complexity of this key metric, let’s first break it down into its key components and what they mean:
- Impressions: The number of links to your site a user saw in search results.
- Clicks: Count of clicks from a search result that landed a user on your property.
- CTR (Click-through rate): The click count divided by the impression count.
- Average search position: The average position of the results showing for your site or campaign.
- Position: The position value for a URL relating to a specific query.
In general, ranking for position #1 in the search engine results page will lead to higher impressions and increase the likelihood of users clicking on your site’s page. A study from FirstPage in 2023 revealed that ranking at the top of the SERP generated a CTR of 39.8%, whilst the second and third results got 18.7% and 10.2% respectively.
This means that your goal should be to rank #1, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward when it comes to SEO. Of course, ranking high is fantastic and a valuable driver of traffic, but there are a few other players you need to consider.
How visibility is affected by featured snippets
Over recent years, the SERP has changed significantly, with rank #1 being displaced further and further down the page in favour of sponsored results, featured snippets, ‘people also ask’, and other SERP features. For any given query, your results page might look a bit like this (see right).
In a bid to provide a more helpful experience for users, Google introduced Featured Snippets as a way to give users a quick response to their query. These Featured Snippets get higher visibility than traditional results, appearing above any other result in the SERP.
According to data from Advanced Web Ranking, in 2024, snippets, which are also called position #0, typically have a CTR above 30%. This development shifted the goal from just wanting rank #1 to securing as many featured snippets as possible as a way to drive visibility and organic traffic.
The effectiveness of featured snippets
To prove just how accurate this metric was, I set out to investigate how CTRs differed after the acquisition of featured snippets by looking at one of our client’s websites – Delphi. For Delphi’s Masters of Motion campaign, we created a knowledge base with informational content that secured 26 featured snippets for the site. This, alongside excellent rankings in “natural” search, has translated into a 350% surge in impressions and an 820% rise in traffic between January and August of 2024.
To discover if our secured snippets had anything to do with this performance, I decided to explore a few individual cases. We’ve recently acquired a snippet for the “cleaning fuel injector” query, and have seen a rapid growth in CTR of 30% in recent weeks, which is in line with the stats from Advanced Web Ranking.
I also wanted to see whether this means performance is sustained over time, so I had a look at some of the first featured snippets we secured this year. The graphs below show the CTR over time for the queries “What does a NOx sensor do?” and “Faulty knock sensor symptoms”. There are important surges at different points in the year where it surpasses 40%, however, it tends to perform between 15% and 20% for most of the year.
This confirms that long-lasting positive outcomes can be achieved when ranking for position #0. It also reflects that it is not a static metric that should always be maintained above 30%, but rather a dynamic measure of success that’s tied to impressions, seasonality and any other relevant changes in the SERP. Overall, having an approach where you target featured snippets is a valid approach when handling SEO campaigns.
Looking to the future
The search landscape is everchanging, and in 2024, Google was not one to fall behind the rise of AI and the possibilities that exist when integrating it into search. Google Gemini is now part of many daily searches and has changed the SERP yet again.
With this update, we can expect users to get tailored responses to their queries without needing to visit the source material that Google is using to generate its answer. This means it will become harder to track visibility, as the AI generated responses will change from one user to another. There is also the potential that we will see significant changes in CTR due to rankings being displaced and a reduced need to click through.
According to Pierre Far from Search Engine Land, because of the way AI overviews are shown to users, they present a landscape where we’ll need to think about CTRs and measure visibility with a different lens. So far, we’ve seen Gemini show a preference for commercial results, pull data from the top 10 results in the SERP and face the usual difficulties in providing accurate responses as most AI tools still do, though it is getting better.
In such a dynamic environment it’s hard to be conclusive on the impact that AI overviews will have on search. As a digital team, we’re measuring the impact of this feature for our clients to ensure we provide the best recommendations for utilizing organic search as a valuable acquisition channel for commercial success.