The tool Sistrix offered by the SISTRIX GmbH in Bonn is beside the Xovi in German-speaking most widely used analysis program for website rankings in Google. In addition to the tool’s most important key figure, the visibility index, Sistrix offers extensive analysis options for SEO, SEA and social media.
The Sistrix Visibility Index
According to sportingology.com, the Sistrix Visibility Index indicates the visibility of a page in Google searches. The higher the index value, the better the visibility of the page. The visibility index is now available for nine European countries and the USA. Sistrix does not disclose how exactly the values are calculated. However, the tool provider allows in its SEO knowledge database under “ What is the Visibility Index? ”A little insight into the basics of the index. The visibility index is then calculated as follows:
– The recalculation takes place once a week.
– Seasonal cycles are not taken into account, which makes the results of SEO measures easier to understand.
– For the calculation, Sistrix selects 250,000 keywords that achieve top 100 positions on Google. The keywords come from very wide range of topics in order to cover as many topics / products etc. as possible relevant keywords. For comparison: The Duden – German spelling contains around 140,000 headwords. Of the 250,000 keywords, 10 percent refer to current events every week in order to make their possible effects on a website visible.
– An expected click rate is determined for all keywords in relation to their ranking and search volume.
The smartphone visibility index
Since April 2015, Google has also taken into account the user-friendliness of a website on smartphones when ranking. Sistrix has therefore introduced smartphone visibility in addition to desktop visibility and shows both of them in the SEO overview of the website. The calculation is carried out in the same way as the desktop search, only with the information on the mobile view of a hit. Therefore, the data can also be viewed for all countries that can be evaluated via Sistrix up to now.
Use of the visibility index for search engine optimization
The visibility index can be used to track the success of SEO measures and the effects of Google updates. In addition, the visibility development enables competitor analyzes for segments, ie you can view the development of your competitors parallel to your site, both the development of the entire domain and the development related to a selected keyword.
However, a rising / falling visibility index is no guarantee that more / fewer visitors will actually visit the site or that there will be more / fewer conversions, e.g. purchases or subscribing to a newsletter. There is basically a connection between the visibility index and the number of visitors coming via Google, but the index is not a traffic index that measures the page visits. The increasing / decreasing values are only based on a keyword selection that is used to visit the page. In addition, significantly poorer values for a keyword can lower the visibility index, although this keyword has only little influence on the relevant visitor flow for the page, and thus indicate a somewhat “skewed”, apparently negative development.
Additional information:
Case study: Visibility index and traffic in comparison
The visibility index
Functional scope of Sistrix
The Sistrix Toolbox consists of six modules: SEO, Universal, Links, Ads, Social and Optimizer. With the tool, you can not only carry out SEO analyzes, but also evaluate your social media activities or the performance of search engine ads or your competitors. The SEO module forms the basic module and thus a compact domain overview with all important SEO key figures. The following functions are included here:
– the visibility index
– Ranking monitoring
– competitor analysis
– Keyword research
The other modules at a glance:
Universal
Enables the analysis of the website from a universal search point of view. This includes searching via Google News, image and video searches.
Left
Analyze the backlink profiles of your own website and of competitors, check the quality of potential backlink sources
Ads
Analysis and monitoring of Google Ads campaigns and banner advertising. For example, you can quickly see for which terms the competition is placing advertisements and how things are in general with competitors’ Google Ads activity.
Social
Tracking of reach in five of the largest social networks: Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Ads for interactions such as comments, shares or likes can be used to see which posts cause particularly good social signals.
Optimizer
You can use the Optimizer module to check websites for SEO errors. Projects can be created, the development of which can be monitored according to the error elimination. There is an individual visibility index for this, the keyword base of which can be defined individually. This function is particularly interesting for niche websites, which are often only insufficiently covered by the “normal” Sistrix visibility index.
The Sistrix Toolbox offers extensive help resources. In addition to the “Ask Sistrix” section, there is, for example, a free e-book with many case studies, analysis options and evaluations of key values.
