A few months ago I was on a call with a client who was frustrated. His rankings looked fine. He had a spreadsheet full of keywords sitting in positions four through eight, a couple of number ones, and his monthly report was a wall of little green arrows. But sales were flat, and he wanted to know why the good rankings were not turning into anything.
So I asked him a different question. Out of all the clicks available for the keywords you actually care about, what percentage are you getting?
He had no idea. Most people don’t. That number has a name, and it is share of voice.
I like this metric because it cuts through the thing that makes rankings so easy to lie to yourself about. A page sitting in position five for a term nobody searches is a green arrow that means nothing. Share of voice makes you look at the whole pie instead of admiring individual slices.
What is share of voice and search visibility, really?
Share of voice started as an advertising idea. The original version measured how much of the total ad spend in a category belonged to one brand. If everyone in your market spent ten million dollars on ads last year and you spent one million of it, your share of voice was 10 percent. That was the whole concept. A way to size your presence against everyone else fighting for the same attention.
Share of voice marketing has spread well beyond paid ads since then. In broader digital marketing, that same logic also shows up in search engine marketing, where search engine optimization SEO and paid search work together, and SEM combines SEO and PPC strategies for a fuller view of visibility. The same logic gets applied to social mentions, PR coverage, and the part I care about here, organic search. The formula barely changes no matter where you point it:
Share of voice = your visibility divided by the total visibility in the market, times 100.
In SEO, visibility usually means clicks. So SEO share of voice is the percentage of all the organic clicks available for a set of keywords that actually lands on your site, compared with every other site ranking for those same terms, which is why search engine optimization matters inside a wider search engine optimization seo strategy.
That “set of keywords” part is doing a lot of work, and I will come back to it, because it is where most people get the number wrong.
Why I trust it more than a rankings report
Here is what gets me about standard ranking reports. They treat every keyword as if it counts the same. Position three is position three, whether the term gets 50 searches a month or 50,000.
Share of voice refuses to play along, and some teams go a step further with weighted share of voice, which factors in ad position and SERP features instead of treating every result in search rankings equally. It weights everything by how much traffic is genuinely on the table, giving you a clearer view of search visibility than a flat list of positions. One number-one ranking for a high-volume, high-intent keyword can be worth more than a dozen top-five rankings for terms nobody searches. Roll all of that into a single percentage and you get something closer to the truth: how much of your market’s attention you are capturing right now, not just where you sit in search engine rankings.
There is a forward-looking reason to watch it too. In brand marketing there is a well-documented pattern, often credited to research by Les Binet and Peter Field, that brands whose share of voice runs ahead of their market share tend to grow, while brands that fall behind tend to shrink. I would not treat that as a law of physics, and it was built on ad spend rather than search clicks. But the underlying idea travels. If you are capturing a bigger slice of the search conversation than your size would predict, you are usually building something. If your slice is shrinking, a competitor is quietly eating your lunch, and a report full of green arrows can hide that for months.
How to calculate share of voice
The clean version of the formula looks like this:
SEO share of voice = your estimated clicks across the keyword set, divided by the total estimated clicks for that keyword set, times 100.
In simple terms, this reflects how search engines work: search engines use web crawlers for search engine crawling so search engines discover web pages, then search engine crawlers index them by analyzing content and metadata before rankings on search engine results pages are calculated.
The catch is that nobody knows the exact click counts, so you estimate them. The standard method uses click-through rate by position. Every spot on the results page has an expected click-through rate, but final positions reflect many signals, with Google using 200+ ranking factors. Position one pulls a large chunk of the clicks. Position two pulls noticeably less. By the time you reach position nine, you are fighting over scraps. You take each keyword’s search volume, multiply it by the expected rate for the position you hold, and that gives you an estimate of the clicks you are earning. Do it for every keyword, add it up, and compare it to what every other ranking site is earning.
A quick example
Say you track two keywords.
Keyword A gets 8,000 searches a month, and you rank ninth. Keyword B gets 2,000 searches a month, and you rank second.
Most people assume Keyword A matters more. It has four times the volume. But ninth place barely gets clicked, so your estimated traffic from it is tiny. Second place gets clicked a lot, so even with a quarter of the volume, Keyword B can hand you several times more actual clicks. Your share of voice reflects that. Volume tells you what is possible. Position tells you what you are getting.
Add up your estimated clicks across both keywords, divide by the total clicks landing on every site that ranks for them, and you have your number. If the keyword set has 10,000 clicks floating around each month and your pages pull 1,500 of them, your share of voice is 15 percent.
Or just let a tool do the math
You do not have to build this in a spreadsheet, and I usually don’t, because most SEO tools in a normal SEO stack already calculate it for you. Ahrefs reports a share of voice metric inside Rank Tracker once you add your keywords and a few competitors. Semrush does the equivalent through the visibility score in its Position Tracking tool. Google Search Console and Google Analytics complement that view by showing search queries, visibility trends, and page performance around the share-of-voice data. You point the tool at the keywords you care about, tell it who your competitors are, and it plots everyone’s share over time.
The chart is the useful part. A single share-of-voice number is fine. Watching the lines cross is better. When your line climbs and a competitor’s dips after you ship a piece of content or earn a batch of links, you can see the cause and effect for yourself, and the best SEO tools make that measurement easier to turn into a clearer SEO strategy.
The metric is only as honest as your keyword list
This is the part I wish someone had hammered into me earlier. Share of voice is completely at the mercy of the keywords you feed it.
Track every keyword you happen to rank for, including all the random long-tail terms you stumbled into, and your share of voice will look inflated and tell you nothing useful. Track a tight list of the terms that map to your business, match user intent and search intent, and reach people who might actually buy from you, and the number means something. It becomes a real scoreboard for the search space you are trying to win.
I have watched a site post a healthy overall share of voice and feel great about it, then watched that number collapse to low single digits the moment we filtered down to high-intent, ready-to-buy keywords. That gap was the whole story. It told us exactly where the content and the links needed to go.
So before you obsess over the percentage, spend the time on the list. Define the keyword set with keyword research, choose keyword phrases based on how users search and broader search behavior, add the competitors genuinely fighting you for it, and leave the vanity terms out.
How to actually grow your share of voice with an SEO strategy
Once you are measuring it properly, the question becomes how to move it, especially since SEO generates free traffic while paid search requires payment for clicks. A few things I keep coming back to:
- Fix what is almost working first. The fastest gains rarely come from publishing brand-new articles. They come from pages already sitting in positions four through ten. Nudging one of those into the top three on a keyword that matters moves your share of voice far more than a new post landing on page two. Stronger on-page SEO, smarter internal links, better technical SEO, and improved content quality usually do the job. SEO often takes three to six months to show meaningful results, so improving existing pages can shorten the path to gains.
- Earn links to the pages that count. Rankings on competitive terms still lean heavily on authority, which is why off-page SEO and off page optimization are not optional. Point your link building at the specific pages tied to your most valuable keywords, not just the homepage, because domain authority, external links, and your site’s reputation still influence how those pages perform.
- Pick your battles. You will not win every keyword, and you should not try to. Concentrate your effort on the cluster where a few positions of improvement turn into real clicks and real revenue.
None of this is glamorous. Organic search drives 53% of all site traffic, which is exactly why steady SEO work matters. It is the same patient, compounding work SEO has always rewarded. Share of voice just gives you a cleaner way to tell whether it is working.
Where this is heading: share of voice in AI search
I can’t write about this in 2026 and ignore the obvious shift. More people are starting their research inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews instead of scrolling a list of blue links. Even so, traditional search engines still dominate discovery, and mobile devices account for 58% of Google searches. That is also why Google announced a mobile-first indexing approach in 2016. That has created a second kind of share of voice: how often your brand gets named and cited in AI-generated answers compared with your competitors.
The principle is identical. You are still measuring your slice of a finite conversation. The mechanics are different, the tools for tracking it are newer and rougher, and the measurement is honestly less settled than classic SEO share of voice, though answer engine optimization, structured data, and content formats that help AI systems interpret sources are already part of the shift. I would not bet a whole strategy on those numbers yet. But I would start paying attention, because the brands that show up when an AI builds someone a shortlist are going to have the same quiet advantage that top organic rankings used to guarantee.
So, what’s your number?
If you take one thing from this, make it the question I asked that client. Forget the green arrows for a second. Out of all the clicks available for the keywords that matter to your business, how many are you actually getting? On Google Search alone – where Google covers 88% of the global search engine market – even small gains in visibility across search results can matter.
If you don’t know, that is worth finding out. And if the answer is lower than you would like, that gap is probably the most useful thing you will learn this quarter. Some teams also pair share of voice with Space Ownership, which measures the percentage of top-ranking positions a brand holds on SERPs and gives a clearer view of search engine results. Search engines drive 39% of online shopping traffic, and that matters even more as the seo market expands, with the global SEO industry set to reach $154.6 billion by 2030 and more businesses investing in SEO services. If you want a hand working out where yours stands and how to close it, that is the kind of thing we do at Shortlist all day. Happy to take a look.