In SEO strategy, there is an element that has positioned itself in recent years as an upside meter. It is the so-called search share . The indicator is, according to Kantar, “the most important metric you’ve never heard of.”
The search share – share of search in the original in English – serves to control how much they are looking for a brand compared to the competition. Kantar’s definition of this metric is: “the volume of search requests for a brand as a proportion of all searches for all brands that define a category.”
Therefore, it is not only something to consider in terms of SEO, but also in marketing matters. It is indicating that things are being done well in positioning, but also that the brand sounds and leads consumers to search for it on the net. It is on this last point that its importance for the marketing strategy is based.
As pointed out in Marketing Week , search share is a perfect indicator to understand the market share of companies and their products. Analyst James Hankins, from Vizer Consulting working for the IPA, has concluded, based on data from brands from various countries, languages and sectors, that the search share is equivalent to 83% of the market share of a brand.
That is, by looking at these data, it is possible to extrapolate what weight a brand has in a market. In fact, the study has found parallels between movements in search and general movements in the market. When a brand manages to increase its search share, it also does so with its weight in the market.
The same is true in reverse: if a company sees that its search presence begins to decline, it should be concerned, because so will its connection to the market. In short, search share is not a fixed element, but dynamic and subject to change. These changes are not only an element that sets the SEO agenda but also a key to go further.
What it reveals about the marketing strategy
Therefore, the indicator not only works as an interesting scale in terms of SEO and web positioning, but it could also help companies to understand their position in the market. Its movements and fluctuations would thus serve to understand how solid and stable the brand’s position is, helping to make strategic decisions about the future and the present of the company.
“The use cases suggest considerable interest in the predictive and competitive potential to participate in decision making,” says the analyst. If the data is showing that the interest of Internet users in searches is falling, it is an alarm signal that brands must wake up to improve their position with consumers and consolidate their advantage points.
At the end of the day, these conclusions do not seem so surprising if one takes into account that already when the search share began to be mentioned, it was indicated that it served to understand the popularity of the brand. It involved direct access to data that indicated how consumers knew your brand name or sounded like it to them, reaching your products directly from it.