The Visibility tab is the first go-to report to understanding your present search performance, and that is pre-requisite to executing an efficient Internet Marketing program.

This report simply indicates which keywords your website ranks for and how it is displayed. That sounds simple, but its not, because there are 5 possible placements available in SERPs. Naturally, you want your website to rank #1 in Natural results. However your business can also be displayed in The Business Card, a Map, Places and Paid results and combinations thereof. All of which increase the real estate your website gets in SERPs and thus it will affect the number of visitors to your website.

Keywords

When we initially setup your account in SearchStation, it automatically generates the keywords you MUST rank for. These are your business name, brand keywords – and local keyword combinations derived from those. This forms the backbone of logic of SearchStation.

If everything looks as though your SERPs are normal, you can usually cut the paid search bids to only a few cents on your business name keywords and still get the #1 spot in both paid ads as well as #1 in natural. This will save $ and extend your current budget.

If that is not the case, we know something is wrong, and thus we can begin hunting for what that might be (the SEO department).

Short Tails (short generic brand keywords)

You will be surprised to find that your business does not rank at all for keywords of your products such as “2015 Toyota Tacoma”, while on your desktop computer you see different results – and then also different on your mobile device. This is personalization in play wherein search engines use your past search profile to provide a personalize experience. Because SearchStation has no history, it therefore reports as though it has never searched for anything before. This produces a more generic results (although it is also not like those results your customer sees either), but at least it is neutral.

In the case of these short tail keywords there is often no alternative to get good placement except through paid search (PPC). But since we will also see which of our competition is bidding on paid ads (PPC Ads Count tab), we can accurately and strategically counter their exposure. Again we are only maximizing our exposure vs our marketing budget, but with a 360 view of our competitive landscape.