How to Measure & Increase Online Visibility? 2024 Practical Guide

Adidas or Nike – which company has better online visibility? 

In the last 30 days, Nike received 35% more mentions and had more extensive reach than Adidas, both on social media and beyond. Nike’s Presence Score (83/100) was higher by 5 points than Adidas. 

Want to check the same online visibility metrics for your business and its competitors? You are in the right place to learn how.

Online visibility refers to the presence and prominence of a brand, individual, or topic across various digital platforms. A high visibility index makes certain contents easily discoverable and accessible to target audiences.
To measure your online visibility, you need a holistic approach and specialized tools to calculate your metrics and provide actionable insights to inform your strategy.

The online environment is a perfect place for your brand to thrive.

You can find potential customers, spread brand awareness, establish credibility for your business, and promote your services. 

There’s only one catch.

You need to be visible to benefit from all the boons of the internet. 

While anyone can share posts or launch a website, standing out from the crowd requires strategic action. 

Fortunately, you’ve landed in the right place to discover effective strategies for increasing online visibility.

Table of contents:

• What is online visibility?
• How to measure online visibility?
• 5 tips to increase online visibility
• Conclusion

What is online visibility?

Online visibility refers to the ease of finding your brand on the internet.

When your business has good visibility, you show up in search results when people are looking for what you offer. 

It’s like being right there when someone says, “Hey, I need that!” 

Whether through search engines, social media, or other online platforms, being visible means that people can discover your business without having to search too hard. 

So, think of online visibility as your way of standing out in the digital world and ensuring customers can find you when they need you most!

For instance, when searching for running shoes in Google, a few prominent websites appear in the first place.

These are well-known brands like Nike, Asics, and New Balance, as well as runners-dedicated forums like Runner’s World.

That’s what excellent online visibility looks like.

Key factors influencing online visibility include:

• Quality and relevance of website content
• Search engine optimization (SEO) strategies
• Social media platforms presence and engagement
• Online reviews and reputation
• Backlinks and referral traffic
• Website speed and mobile-friendliness
• Consistency in business information across the internet
• User experience and website design
• Local search optimization efforts

Why is online visibility important?

Online visibility is crucial because it helps your brand stand out in the crowded online space! 

It ensures potential customers can find you easily, boosting your chances of attracting new business and building a strong online presence.

How to measure online visibility?

Understanding how visible your brand is across various online channels is crucial in today’s online world. It helps you assess your marketing efforts, track your progress, and identify areas for improvement. 

By measuring online visibility, you can gain insights into your brand’s reach, engagement, and reputation.

This, in turn, allows you to make informed decisions to enhance your online presence and effectively connect with your target audience.

Pro tip: Measure the visibility of your competitors online to get benchmarks. On this basis, fine-tune your online marketing strategies and set your business goals.

Measuring online visibility involves assessing various metrics to understand the extent of your brand’s presence and impact across digital platforms. 

Analyzing these metrics gives you valuable insights into your brand recognition, visibility, engagement, and overall online performance.

Here are 7 most important metrics to track:

• Website traffic
• Search engine rankings
• Keywords
• Social and non-social reach
• The volume of mentions 
• Presence Score 
• Share of voice

Website traffic

Measuring website traffic is key to assessing your online visibility. It tells you who’s visiting your site, how often, and what they’re up to while they’re there. 

By keeping an eye on your website traffic, you can see if your online presence is growing or if it needs a little boost. 

Plus, it helps you understand which strategies work so you can make smart decisions to improve your online visibility and attract even more visitors.

How to measure?

One effective way to measure website traffic is using tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs. 

These tools offer comprehensive website analytics features that allow you to track metrics related to your website’s performance, including:

• traffic volume, 
• sources of traffic, 
• user engagement metrics,
• and traffic by location.

You can access detailed reports by entering your website’s URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. It provides insights into your website’s traffic patterns, reflecting your brand visibility online.

Additionally, Ahrefs offers advanced features such as keyword analysis and competitor benchmarking, enabling you to refine your digital marketing strategies based on actionable data. 

Search engines rankings

Tracking search engines for your website or blog helps you understand where your site stands in search engine results pages (SERPs). 

High rankings for relevant keywords indicate that your content appears to users searching for related topics. This increases the likelihood of attracting organic traffic and potential customers. 

By monitoring search engine rankings, you can identify opportunities to improve your website’s visibility and better compete with other sites in your niche. 

How to measure?

Use Ahrefs to measure your search engines positions effectively. 

Ahrefs offers a robust Rank Tracker that monitors your website’s rankings for specific keywords across various search engines. 

Input the keywords you want to track, and Ahrefs will provide detailed reports showing your current rankings, historical data, and trends over time. 

Additionally, Ahrefs offers insights into competitors’ rankings, enabling you to benchmark your performance against industry peers and identify areas for improvement. 

Leverage Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker and implement an SEO strategy based on its recommendations. This way, you’ll work towards improving your search ranks and enhancing your visibility on the Internet.

Keywords

Track organic, relevant keywords your company ranks for to understand your online visibility.

These keywords directly reflect the queries that users search for. Ranking well for them indicates that your website is appearing prominently in search results. 

This good exposure translates into more website traffic and potential customers seeing your offer.

By monitoring keywords, you learn how effectively your content aligns with user intent and interests. It also opens up the opportunity to conduct search engine optimization for better positioning.

Additionally, tracking keyword rankings informs you about changes in search trends.

How to measure?

We are staying on Site Explorer in Ahrefs.

On the left-hand side, you will find the Organic search section with the Organic keywords tab.

There, you can check for which keywords your site ranks together with a bunch of useful metrics and insights into their performance.

Besides, Ahrefs offers a powerful Keywords Explorer.

This feature allows you to analyze the performance of specific keywords. It provides valuable metrics, including search volume, keyword difficulty, and click-through rates. 

In this way, Ahrefs supports both analysis of your website’s target keywords performance and keyword research for your content marketing strategy.

You can also see if your website positions in the top search engine results pages for a certain keyword. If not, you can add your page to the comparison and see how much you need to catch up.

Social media reach

Your social media reach directly translates to your online visibility. It’s all about how many people see the online content on your social media accounts. 

The higher the reach, the more people will come across your content. They can interact with it, boosting your visibility or purchase form your business online. 

Both cases are a win-win situation.

Understanding how far your content reaches allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts and identify opportunities for improvement. 

Moreover, tracking social reach enables you to assess the impact of your online content marketing, engagement tactics, and promotional campaigns. 

This helps you tailor your approach to maximize visibility and engagement with your target audience.

How to measure?

Brand24 offers a user-friendly interface that presents your social reach as a linear graph. This way, it’s easy to visualize and understand your performance over time. 

By tracking your social reach with Brand24, you can identify trends, patterns, and fluctuations in your reach metrics. Thus, you can adapt your social media strategy for the best results. 

Brand24 measures reach on social media platforms, including:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• X (Twitter)
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Reddit
• Pinterest
• TikTok
• Quora
• and Twitch

Additionally, Brand24 allows you to compare your social media reach with that of your competitors. It is a valuable benchmarking insight useful for competitor analysis.

With Brand24’s comprehensive social media monitoring capabilities, you can effectively measure and optimize your social reach to enhance your brand’s visibility and engagement online.

The volume of mentions 

Generally, the more mentions, the better. It means that people are talking about your business online. They are spreading your brand awareness and boosting your business reach.

However, what you need to remember is that not only quantity counts. Quality is even more important.

That’s why, together with the volume of mentions, you should monitor their sentiment.

Mentions function as social proof for your potential customers. Thus, you should ensure your target audience leaves positive reviews and comments online.

How to measure?

With Brand24, measuring your volume of mentions is a piece of cake!

Within your media monitoring project, you’ll discover a dedicated chart showcasing your mentions’ volume over time.

This chart features Anomaly Detection, denoted by exclamation marks at peak points. Clicking on them reveals the reasons behind sudden spikes in your mention volume. 

Such peaks could stem from heightened positive reviews or influencer endorsements, while others might signal a PR crisis and reputation damage. 

With Anomaly Detector, you’re always informed about online activities concerning your business, enabling prompt responses.

Use the comparison feature for further insight. There are period comparison and project comparison options.

The former evaluates your own performance in different time periods. It allows you to assess your progress and gauge the effectiveness of your online marketing strategies.

Let’s look at the Nike period comparison.

As you can see, Nike is performing worse in the current period than in the previous one. The total number of mansions dropped visibly, along with the Presence Score and the number of user-generated content. 

Surprisingly, social media reach and non-social media mentions did significantly increase – both by around 50%. 

Despite a drop in several metrics, Nike’s online performance didn’t suffer that much. AVE increased by 10%. 

Now, let’s move on to the project comparison. This feature enables primarily competitor analysis. 

For instance, let’s compare Nike and Adidas monitoring projects

In the last 30 days, Nike received 35% more mentions than Adidas. The company also had more extensive reach and a better Presence Score. 

However, it was Adidas to have a better sentiment (5k more positive mentions) and over 7k fewer negative mentions.

Overall, the comparison feature offers a holistic insight into your online visibility level and allows for an actionable comparison of your results.

Presence Score

Presence Score is a handy metric informing you about your general position on the market.

Online presence refers to the frequency with which people mention your business online.

It’s estimated on a scale from 0 – a brand with no online presence – to 100 – a worldwide known company with a solid online presence.

Presence Score gives you an immediate impression of how your business is doing. It showcases the position of your business online, giving you an idea of where you are. 

Presence Score is also related to brand awareness and brand recognition levels.

How to measure?

With Brand24, you can measure your Presence Score effortlessly. You will find this metric in the Analysis Tab located in the menu on your left-hand side.

What’s more, Presence Score is also included in the Comparison Tab. There, you can juxtapose your online presence with other companies in the niche.

This way, you can learn whether you have a strong online presence compared to others.

Share of Voice 

The Share of Voice metric is like taking a sneak peek at how loudly your brand is talked about compared to others in the online world. 

It tells you the percentage of conversations that your brand owns in a particular industry or niche. 

The higher your Share of Voice, the more you’re being talked about. This means your online presence is pretty strong. It’s a neat way to gauge how visible your brand is in the online chatter.

How to measure?

Share of Voice is always expressed in the form of percentage share. This means that you need context to calculate this metric.

In Brand24, the Share of Voice metric can be found in the Comparison Tab. 

For instance, here’s a comparison between Nike and Adidas’s Share of Voice. 

You can switch between social and non-social Share of Voice for more specific insights.

5 practical tips to increase visibility online

Here are 5 actionable tips for boosting your business’s online visibility.

Important to know is that building visibility is a multifaceted process requiring you to take care of multiple aspects of your digital marketing performance.

01 Leverage social media platforms

Social media platforms are a key to increasing visibility. There are a few aspects to this.

First of all, you should be present on all the trending social media pages. 

Of course, it depends on your target audience, so test various platforms. You should especially try TikTok and Instagram Reels.

At the moment, humorous and informative video content is winning there.

However, publishing social media posts is not enough. You should also interact and answer your online mentions. 

You can do it with Brand24. The tool detects all your online mentions and groups them according to the sentiment. This way, you’re assured that you won’t miss any comment that counts. 

Plus, you can access external mentions where you were not tagged. This gives you a holistic picture of your online reviews and comments.

Find your unique communication style and surprise your audience with relatable or witty answers. Your hilarious replay may go viral and skyrocket your online presence and recognition.

Here’s a good example. 

By browsing through mentions, you can also collect customer testimonials and display them on your website or social media accounts.

02 Carry out search engine optimization

If you want your business to shine online, SEO is one of the keys. 

It boosts your online visibility by helping your website rank higher in search engine results.

When people search for products or services related to your business, you want to be among the top results they see. SEO optimization ensures just that. 

To get started, focus on keywords relevant to your industry and incorporate them naturally into your website content. Tools like Surfer SEO can help optimize your content for maximum visibility. 

Additionally, use SEMrush to optimize your website’s technical aspects, ensuring it’s user-friendly and search engine-friendly. 

With these tools in your arsenal, your business will be on its way to dominating the SEO rankings.

03 Try paid advertising

This one’s pretty straightforward. Paid search directly impacts your visibility and can significantly increase sales.

The beauty of it lies in its precision targeting. By selecting specific target audiences, you avoid wasting resources on reaching and encouraging customers uninterested in your product or services.

With most paid ads, you can tailor your campaign to reach a particular group of potential customers.

This means your ad will appear at the top of search results when someone from your target audience searches for related keywords.

Paid search typically appear before organic results, giving your brand prime visibility.

Also, consider PPC campaigns through Google Adwords. With this type of paid advertising, you only pay per click on the ad of your potential clients. This ensures you’re only charged for reaching the right audience.

04 Make your social media accounts stand out

Creating a compelling social media profile is essential for boosting online visibility. 

To stand out, focus on producing high-quality content that resonates with your audience and attracts new customers.

Incorporate informative video content to engage users and provide valuable insights. 

Be consistent in creating content that aligns with your brand identity and appeals to your target audience. 

Create content that showcases your expertise, personality, and unique offerings. 

Through social media platforms, you can also find potential partners for collaboration. These can be influencers or other companies.

By working together, you can enhance each other businesses’ reach and drive sales and more traffic, which will, in turn, skyrocket your visibility. 

By consistently delivering valuable and engaging content, you can enhance your online visibility and attract more followers and prospective customers.

05 Take care of your online reviews 

Managing online reviews is crucial for enhancing online visibility and establishing credibility. Positive testimonials significantly impact potential customers’ perception of your brand. 

Encourage satisfied clients to leave customer reviews examples to showcase your business in a favorable light.

By actively monitoring and responding to online reviews, you demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction and build trust with your audience. 

Consistently garnering positive feedback can help attract new customers and improve your online reputation, ultimately boosting visibility and building brand loyalty with your current clients.

You can use media monitoring tools to ensure you don’t miss out on any online review.

With Brand24, you are notified of all the new reviews and comments left by your customers.

All your mentions are categorized according to their sentiment so you can easily reply to the positive ones and solve the problems behind the negative comments.

Conclusion

Online visibility is both about presence on social media platforms and in search engine results.

Thus, you need a holistic and complex approach to simultaneously develop your online marketing strategies on several digital channels.

Start by measuring your current digital presence. It will be a solid starting point from which you can set goals. 

Remember to do a competitor’s check. This way, you can contextualize your online presence and better understand your position in the market. 

If you see that you are falling behind, you can analyze your competitor’s online strategies and catch up by implementing data-driven action plans.

Lastly, check your metrics regularly to see if your strategies work out and adjust them when needed.

Final thoughts:

• Online visibility refers to the ease with which potential customers can find your website when looking for products and services in your niche. It’s about you being in the highest possible in the search engine results.
• Metrics are your cornerstone: Start improving online visibility by checking where you are currently. This way, you can compare your results and determine if your strategies work. Social media monitoring tools will support you with this endeavor.
• Keep an eye on your competitors: Online visibility is quite contextual. Analyzing your performance in relation to your competitors is a good practice.
• Apply a versatile and complex strategy: You need a holistic approach to improve online visibility of your products and services.