What is Share of Voice (SEO)?
Share of Voice in SEO is your domain's estimated percentage of total organic clicks or impressions across a fixed keyword set, compared to competitors ranking on the same terms. It's the single best metric for tracking category dominance because it accounts for both position AND search volume.
How Share of Voice (SEO) works
- Formula: Σ (your keyword volume × expected CTR at your position) / Σ (all competitors' same sum).
- Track weekly against a fixed keyword set — changing the set mid-track breaks trend comparability.
- SoV is superior to average position because it weights high-volume terms appropriately (position 3 on a 50K-volume term matters far more than position 1 on a 50-volume term).
- Use branded vs non-branded SoV separately — branded SoV shows brand demand growth; non-branded shows category-capture growth.
- LLM SoV (citations across ChatGPT / Perplexity / Gemini / Claude) is now a critical parallel metric — track both.
Example
In the "rank tracking" category, if your keyword set has 500K total monthly volume and your expected clicks are 25K, your SoV is 5%. Growing to 10% doubles category traffic without adding a single keyword.
Frequently asked questions about Share of Voice (SEO)
What's a good Share of Voice score?
Depends on category size and competitors. In a 5-competitor category, 20% SoV = parity. In a 50-competitor category, 5% SoV can be category leadership.
How is SoV different from average position?
Average position gives every keyword equal weight. SoV weights by volume × CTR — a truer picture of actual traffic dominance.
Should I track branded and non-branded SoV separately?
Yes — always. Branded SoV shows brand demand growth (a marketing outcome). Non-branded SoV shows category capture (an SEO outcome). Mixing them hides both signals.
Related terms
LLM Share of Voice
LLM Share of Voice is the percentage of relevant AI prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude that cite or mention your brand versus your competitors. It's the AI-search equivalent of organic ranking share and is fast becoming the most predictive top-of-funnel metric for B2B SaaS.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is Moz's 0-100 score predicting how well a website will rank in search. Ahrefs uses Domain Rating (DR), Semrush uses Authority Score (AS) — all three estimate the strength of a site's backlink profile relative to the whole web. Higher = stronger authority = easier ranking.
CTR Curve
A CTR curve is the expected click-through rate at each organic Google position — typically ~30% at #1, ~15% at #2, ~10% at #3, dropping to under 2% by position 10. Modern CTR curves have flattened due to AI Overviews and SERP features consuming clicks before the blue links.
Topical Authority
Topical authority is Google's assessment that your site is a comprehensive, trustworthy source on a specific subject. It's built by covering a topic deeply (breadth × depth × freshness) rather than chasing unrelated high-volume keywords. Sites with strong topical authority rank new pages faster and higher in their niche.