SEO Term Definition
Share of Voice (SOV)
Share of voice in SEO measures what percentage of all clicks for a set of target keywords goes to your website versus competitors, showing your relative market presence in organic search.
Reviewed by Alexander Yarovenko · Updated: 2026-07-03
What is Share of Voice in SEO?
Share of Voice (SOV) in SEO measures the proportion of total organic clicks or visibility a website captures for a defined set of keywords, relative to all other competing websites. It is a market-level metric that goes beyond "how do we rank" to answer "what share of the total available organic search traffic in our market do we own?"
SOV Formula
SEO Share of Voice = (Your Clicks / Total Clicks in Market) × 100
Example:
Total clicks for your target keyword set: 500,000/month
Your site's clicks from those keywords: 25,000/month
SOV = (25,000 / 500,000) × 100 = 5%Why SOV Matters as an SEO Metric
- Business-level view — SOV ties SEO to market position, not just ranking positions
- Tracks competitive momentum — your SOV going up while a competitor's goes down is a meaningful competitive signal
- Better than ranking alone — ranking #3 for 1 keyword is less informative than capturing 8% of total market clicks across 500 keywords
- Correlates with revenue — SOV improvements typically correlate strongly with organic traffic and revenue growth
How to Measure SOV
- Semrush Position Tracking — built-in share of voice metric per keyword set; shows your SOV vs competitors
- Ahrefs Rank Tracker — "Share of Clicks" metric for tracked keyword sets
- Custom calculation — export ranked positions + CTR data from GSC; calculate estimated clicks and compare to total keyword volume