In the world of SEO and digital marketing, measuring your share of voice against competitors is a crucial analytics exercise. Share of voice refers to the percentage of overall visibility that your brand captures for important keywords, relative to competitor brands. Tracking this metric over time allows you to gauge how well your SEO strategy is working compared to rival companies.

A high and increasing share of voice indicates that your SEO activities are successfully improving visibility and stealing market share from competitors. On the flip side, a decreasing share of voice suggests that rival brands are outperforming you in organic search.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about measuring share of voice and leveraging this data to beat the competition, including:

• Defining share of voice and why it matters
• Calculating your share of voice step-by-step 
• Benchmarking share of voice over time  
• Tips for increasing your share of voice relative to competitors

Let’s get started!

What is Share of Voice? 

Share of voice refers to the percentage of total SERP visibility that your brand captures for important keywords in your market or industry niche, compared to other competing brands.

For example, if the top 10 organic search results for the keyword “email marketing software” are:

• 5 results for YourCompany 
• 3 results for CompetitorA
• 1 result for CompetitorB
• 1 result for CompetitorC

Then YourCompany has a 50% share of voice for that keyword, CompetitorA has 30%, CompetitorB 10%, and CompetitorC 10%.

The keywords analyzed for share of voice should be ones that indicate commercial intent and are important for your business, such as product and brand names, industry terms, and other high-value search queries.

Share of voice shows your brand’s dominance and visibility in organic search relative to the competition. If your share of voice is higher, that means you’re capturing more clicks and traffic from those essential keywords.

Why Share of Voice Matters for SEO

Tracking share of voice is a key analytics exercise for several important reasons:

1. Identifies SEO Opportunities: Knowing which keywords your brand ranks well and poorly for compared to competitors highlights areas of opportunity. If you have weak share of voice for certain terms, you can focus your optimization efforts on improving rankings for those queries.

2. Provides Competitive Intelligence: Analyzing the share of voice breakdown gives intel on which competitor brands pose the biggest threat in organic search. You can research what they’re doing well to inform your own SEO strategy.

3. Sets Keyword Targets: The keywords where you lag rivals represent priority targets for increasing rankings and share of voice. Without this data, you won’t know which terms deserve more optimization focus.

4. Tracks SEO Progress Over Time: Regularly measuring share of voice allows you to benchmark progress and see if your efforts are actually working to surpass competitors’ visibility.

5. Identifies Loss of Visibility: Declining share of voice means you’re losing visibility and SERP real estate to rivals, which jeopardizes organic traffic and customers.

6. Drives Link Building: Weak share of voice for a keyword presents an opportunity to pitch guest posts around that term to earn links and increase rankings.

In summary, regularly analyzing your share of voice is crucial for identifying the right SEO growth opportunities and gauging your performance versus competitors over time. It provides unique insights that enable data-driven optimization.

How to Calculate Your Share of Voice

Figuring out your current share of voice versus competitor brands involves a few simple steps:

Identify Your Core Keywords

First, put together a list of your most important keywords and phrases. These should be specific keywords that:

• Drive high search volume/traffic potential
• Relate directly to your business offerings 
• Indicate commercial intent
• Represent topics and pages you want to rank for

To compile this list, utilize keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, review your existing content themes, analyze SEO reporting on top-trafficked pages, and identify industry terminology.

Find Your Rankings for Those Keywords 

Next, you need to determine your current organic search visibility for each target keyword. The easiest way is to use a rank tracking platform like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz. Otherwise, you can manually check rankings in Google for each keyword.

Record your top ranking page and position for each keyword.

Identify Your Top Competitors

Determine 2-3 brands that are your closest competitors—ones that offer similar products or services and compete for the same SERP real estate. Research which brands rank well for your target keywords or have overlapping content themes.

Check Their Rankings for the Same Keywords

Use the same rank tracking process to find your competitors’ current first-page rankings for each target keyword. Identify their top page and ranking position.

Calculate Share of Voice 

With your keywords, rankings, and competitor data, you can calculate the share of voice breakdown. 

For example, for the keyword “content marketing guide”, the analysis might be:

• YourCompany – Position 1
• CompetitorA – Position 2 
• CompetitorA – Position 7

That means you have 50% share of voice, and CompetitorA has 50% share of voice for that term.

Tally up the rankings across all keywords for each brand, then divide them to get percentages. This shows your share of voice versus competitors in aggregate across your target terms.

Benchmark this breakdown, and analyze which keywords present opportunities to increase visibility against rivals.

Benchmarking Your Share of Voice Over Time

The real value in share of voice analysis comes from regularly measuring it over time to benchmark progress. Set a reminder to re-check the share of voice breakdown monthly or quarterly. 

Trend lines to assess:

• Is your overall share of voice percentage increasing or decreasing?
• Are you gaining or losing visibility for important keywords versus competitors?
• How does the breakdown compare to previous periods?

This tracking shows whether your SEO efforts are actually working to surpass competitors’ visibility in organic search. If your share of voice is declining steadily, it means rivals are outpacing your optimization efforts.

Leverage these trends to identify new threats from competitors and keywords where your rankings are slipping so you can address them. Share of voice benchmarking provides an SEO report card for how you’re performing against other brands.

Increasing Your Share of Voice 

Gaining share of voice over your competitors should be an ongoing goal. Here are proven tactics to improve your share of voice:

Earn More Links

Earning additional links pointing to your pages with anchor text around your target keywords can boost rankings for those terms.

– Guest post on industry blogs

– Promote your content on social media 

– Refresh old content and outreach to get updated links

– Build relationships with influencers to get linked mentions

Check which pages and content your competitors rank well for a keyword, and try to earn links to your content around those same topics.

Improve On-Page SEO 

Optimizing your on-page SEO for pages targeting keyword themes with weak share of voice boosts relevancy.

– Include the keyword in headings, meta descriptions, and image file names

– Highlight the keyword in the opening paragraph 

– Include related keywords in the content

– Optimize page load speed and mobile experience

Create More Content  

Adding new pages and content around the keywords where your share of voice lags can help increase overall visibility and authority on those topics. Identify related topics and secondary keywords to target.

Promote Content

Don’t just publish and forget. Actively promote new content through social media, email newsletters, PR outreach, retargeting ads, and internal linking. This amplification helps search engines recognize quickly that new content deserves to rank well.

Perform Technical SEO Audits

It only takes one technical hiccup to drastically reduce organic visibility. Ensure your site is technically sound through comprehensive audits checking indexation, duplicate content, site speed, structured data, URL structure and more. Address any issues that might be hurting pages for key terms.

Conclusion

Measuring and increasing your share of voice versus competitor brands is a pivotal SEO exercise. By regularly analyzing your share of voice trends for core keywords, you gain data-driven insights on how to surpass rivals’ visibility in organic search.

Focus on benchmarking share of voice monthly or quarterly to track progress. Leverage the intel to earn links, optimize existing content, create new content around lagging keywords, and address any technical issues impacting rankings.

With a strategic approach to boosting your share of voice over time, you can steadily convert more organic visibility into traffic and sales away from competing brands. Dominating the SERP results for commercial keywords reflects a healthy, well-rounded SEO strategy.