What does the Share of Voice metric mean? How do we calculate the visibility score?
The share of voice (SOV) metric shows the percentage of traffic that your target website gets, compared to the traffic of other websites.
There are now two places where you can the find Share of Voice metric in Ahrefs. In Site Explorer, and in Rank Tracker.
💡 In both Site Explorer and Rank tracker, Share of Voice is calculated differently, and cannot be used interchangeably. Read further 👇 to see how they differ.
In Site Explorer
You can create a SoV chart comparing your target website against multiple competitors using the Performance chart on Site Explorer > Overview. First add competitors to the performance graph, and then select the "Share of Voice" metric:
How SoV is calculated in Site Explorer
The SoV of one website can be found by dividing its traffic with the sum of all websites' traffic. It looks like this:
Your target's Traffic / (Your targets' Traffic + the Traffic of each of your competitors) x 100
which results in a percentage number that you can see by hovering over the graph:
In Rank Tracker
In your Rank Tracker tool, you will see the Share of Voice (SOV) metric shown in the project dashboard:
In Overview:
As well as in the Competitors Overview:
How SoV is calculated in Rank Tracker
Share of Voice in Rank Tracker is calculated based on how many clicks your website receives, versus the rest of the results in the SERP of keywords that it ranks for. So the formula is different than in Site Explorer:
Total clicks your target receives from all Tracked keywords / Total clicks going to all result in the SERP receives for all Tracked keywords
So for a hypothetical example, the keyword "Coffee beans" in South Africa has a monthly search volume of 10,000 and total 5,000 clicks going to all results in the SERP, here is how Share of Voice would be calculated for the top 5 results in the SERP:
SERP for Coffee beans - 🇿🇦
Position | URL | Clicks | SoV |
1 | coffeelovers.za | 1500 | 30% |
2 | coffeemania.com | 930 | 18.6% |
3 | commonmancoffeeroasters.com | 860 | 17.2% |
4 | coffee.za | 450 | 9% |
5 | superbeans/za | 200 | 4% |
This is just one keyword. So if you have Rank Tracker set up for the website coffee.za, the Share of Voice would be calculated for all Tracked keywords.