What is Share of Voice (SOV)?

What is Share of Voice?

Share of Voice (SoV) is a metric that shows what percentage of visibility in search results a domain or brand has compared to the competition. It provides insight into your market share within organic search results. The higher the Share of Voice, the greater your visibility compared to other players in the market.

How does Share of Voice work?

The calculation of Share of Voice depends on the SEO software you use. At SmartRanking, we primarily use the metric as provided by AccuRanker. AccuRanker calculates SoV based on:

• The search volume for the selected keywords.
• The rankings a domain achieves for these keywords.
• The expected CTR (click-through rate) per search term.

Combining these factors provides a reliable picture of a domain’s visibility in Google (search visibility) compared to the competition.

Why is Share of Voice Important for SEO?

Share of Voice is a powerful KPI for measuring the effectiveness of SEO efforts. It not only shows how visible your website is, but also how you’re performing compared to competitors. Key benefits include:

• Market Share Insights: You can see how large your share is in the organic search results.
• Competitive Analysis: You can see which competitors are gaining or losing ground.
• Measurable growth: You can track the impact of SEO efforts over time.
• Strategic focus: It helps you set priorities within your SEO strategy.

Example of Share of Voice

Suppose you have a set of 1,000 keywords with an estimated number of visitors of 5,000 based on your current visibility. Based on the corresponding expected CTRs per search term, AccuRanker calculates that your website has a potential reach of 50,000 clicks. In that case, your Share of Voice is 10%.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Share of Voice

Using Share of Voice as a metric has several major advantages, but also some disadvantages. It’s important to be aware of both the advantages and the disadvantages.

The benefits:

• It provides a clear and comparable picture of your visibility in the market.
• It helps with benchmarking against competitors.
• You combine multiple data points (position, search volume, CTR) into a single metric.

The disadvantages:

• It depends on the quality of your keyword list: an incomplete set can give a distorted picture.
• There are differences between tools: the calculation methods vary, which means that results are not always directly comparable.

Share of Voice in Practice

At SmartRanking, we use Share of Voice as one of the key KPIs in our SEO projects. It helps us quantify project progress and demonstrate how much market share we’re gaining for our clients. By monitoring SoV, we can immediately see which SEO activities have the greatest impact on visibility.