Tools

How to Analyze Visibility on the Internet

The success of many companies stands and falls with their visibility on the Internet. We show you some tools to measure the online visibility of websites.

Why Analyzing Online Visibility Is Important #

30 years ago, a digital presence was only something for dreamers and had little significance in the marketing mix. Today, in many cases, the future success of a company stands and falls with its online visibility. A strong web presence makes it possible to be found online by potential customers, increase website traffic and raise brand awareness.

However, to achieve good positioning on the internet, it is not only important to have a presence, but also to define goals and take appropriate measures to ensure that the plans can be realized. It is therefore essential to keep checking how successful you are and where there is still potential. This is where measuring results and visibility on the Internet comes into play, as various analysis tools can be used to gain valuable insights into the performance of the online strategy. This makes it easy to evaluate and optimize the effectiveness of marketing activities. Let’s take a closer look at some of these tools.

Google Search Console #

Many people are familiar with the Google Analytics tracking tool (see below), less well known but at least as important for measuring the visibility of your own online presence is the Google Search Console. With this free application, website operators can monitor the performance of their website in the organic Google search results and gain valuable insights. Among other things, it can be used to check how the website performs in the Google ranking, how many impressions or views the page receives per day, month or year and how many clicks are generated via organic Google search.

Single subpages of the website can also be analyzed. If, for example, the content of a specific subpage has been optimized for search engines, you can see with just a few clicks how well the optimization has worked or whether further optimization steps are necessary.

In the case of one of our subpages, we carried out some steps to optimize the content for search engines in August 2023. We were able to track the results of the optimization in detail using the Google Search Console:

The application also offers the option of analyzing how well a very specific subpage performs in terms of ranking in the search results. In our example below, we have evaluated how well one of our subpages performs for very specific keywords and in which positions it appears on average. The keywords can be read on the left, the position in the search engine ranking can be read on the far right. This allows you to see at a glance whether there is still a need for optimization for the keywords that have been defined in your online strategy.

The Google Search Console offers numerous other functions, such as reports on index coverage or the found backlinks. The application should definitely be included when it comes to measuring visibility on the Internet.

Sistrix Visibility Index #

Sistrix summarizes the visibility of a website in the Google search results, making the trend clearly visible and enabling a direct comparison with the competition. With a subscription to Sistrix, you can analyze any page and compare yourself with other websites.

The following example shows the trend of the visibility index of the domain netflix.com.

Source: https://www.sistrix.de/sichtbarkeitsindex/

The Sistrix service requires some budget, but also offers many SEO functions that can be valuable for analyzing your own website. If you want to check the current status of your own visibility (or the visibility of your competitors) according to this index and are satisfied with a basic function, you can also use this free tool from Sistrix.

Tracking Tools: Plausible.io, Google Analytics and Co. #

When measuring visibility, there are of course a number of classic tracking tools for websites. The best-known of these tools is Google Analytics, which offers a wide range of functions for analyzing visitor sources and measuring visitor activity on the website. However, since Google Analytics is repeatedly associated with data protection issues, we recommend alternatives that are GDPR-compliant and do not collect any personal data. At bitperfect, we rely on Plausible.io, which does not use tracking cookies but still provides all the important information.

A deeper insight into the functions of Plausible.io can be found here.

Measuring Domain Authority and Page Authority #

In order to achieve visibility in Google, it is also important to keep an eye on all factors that can contribute to increased visibility. Some SEO tools provide information about the factors that determine how “strong” a domain and individual subpages are, i.e. how high their respective authority is. One of these tools is MOZ, which indicates the “domain authority” and “page authority” on a scale of 1 to 100. These standardized scores make a direct comparison with the market competition possible, since any website can be analyzed with MOZ.

An important indicator for calculating domain authority and page authority are the “linking domains”, i.e. so-called backlinks that link from external websites to the analyzed website (see example below). MOZ provides deep insights into the backlinks of the analyzed website, which can be very helpful for a successful SEO strategy:

MOZ offers a wide range of additional functions. The application is available in a free version, which allows you to analyze 10 different domains per month and gain important insights. However, the free version is limited in functionality. If you need more insights, MOZ offers a paid version for full access.

Conclusion #

Analysis and reporting are important steps to ensure that the taken actions will lead to the planned results. For this purpose, it is crucial to learn from the data and make further optimizations if results do not meet the expectations.

This article has presented some important analysis tools that can help you get a good overview of the visibility of your website. However, there are many other analysis tools available. Depending on the strategic orientation of a company, the use of tools should be carefully selected in order to achieve optimal results.