As SEO professionals, we’ve long struggled with a fundamental question: “How much of the market do we actually own?” Traditional SEO tools have attempted to answer this in various ways, but the solutions have always felt incomplete.
After years leading SEO teams and building my own businesses, I realized there was a critical gap in how we measure and track organic market share.
That’s exactly what we set out to solve with SiteCurve. In this article, I’ll walk you through how our approach to market share tracking provides the actionable intelligence that modern marketing teams need, why it matters, and how it’s fundamentally different from what you’re used to.
The Challenge with Traditional Market Share Analysis
Most SEO professionals rely on a patchwork approach to estimate their organic market share:
- Using ranking data for a small subset of tracked keywords
- Attempting to extrapolate from traffic trends in Google Analytics
- Making educated guesses based on competitive rank tracking
The problem? These methods often miss the bigger picture and fail to provide the context needed for strategic decision-making. They’re either too narrow, too inward-focused, or simply not designed to measure relative market positioning.
Redefining Market Share Tracking with SiteCurve
At SiteCurve, we track and quantify market share through our Share of Voice (SoV) metric, which measures actual visibility in search results across your entire landscape. This isn’t just another vanity metric—it’s a precise calculation of your digital market share based on:
- Ranking positions across your keyword set
- Search volume for each keyword
- Expected click-through rates based on position
- Comprehensive tracking of all competitors in the space
The result is a true picture of who owns what percentage of the organic traffic opportunity in your market.
How Share of Voice Calculation Works
Our SoV calculation is built on a generally accepted click-through-rate model that reflects real-world user behavior.
- Higher positions are weighted more heavily (position #1 assumes you get 38% of clicks, #2, 15%, etc)
- We combine position weight with monthly search volume data
- The calculation accounts for all competitors ranking for your keywords, not just preselected ones
- Results are normalized to show true percentage of market ownership
For example, if your site ranks #1 for a keyword with 10,000 monthly searches, that contributes more to your SoV than ranking #5 for a keyword with 5,000 searches. This calculation is performed across your entire keyword set and updated daily, giving you a living picture of market share distribution.
Market Share Insights That Transform Strategy
Having an accurate measure of market share is just the beginning. The real value comes from the strategic insights this unlocks:
1. Identify Market Leaders and Challengers
With our landscape approach, you can instantly see who the dominant players are in any market—whether you’re currently tracking them or not. For example, a health supplements brand might discover an emerging competitor has captured 7% market share in just three months—a competitor that wasn’t even on their radar until market share tracking revealed them.
2. Spot Market Share Shifts Early
One of the most valuable capabilities is detecting shifts in market share before they become obvious in your analytics data. SiteCurve tracks daily changes and alerts you when significant market share movements occur.
Consider what happens after a Google algorithm update: an ecommerce site might see a 4% market share gain overnight, primarily at the expense of a major competitor who loses 6%. This early insight would allow the team to analyze what changed and double down on the content types that are now performing better.
3. Connect Market Share to Business Models
Beyond just tracking websites, SiteCurve automatically categorizes sites by business model and site type, then shows which models are gaining or losing share. This answers critical strategic questions like:
- Are affiliate sites gaining share over direct sellers?
- Are content publishers outperforming ecommerce sites?
- Which business models have the highest market share volatility?
For instance, in the financial services sector, you might discover that review-focused affiliate sites have collectively gained 12% market share over six months, primarily at the expense of direct provider sites. This insight could drive a complete rethinking of your content strategy.
Practical Applications for Different Organizations
Market share tracking in SiteCurve serves different needs depending on your organization:
For In-House SEO Teams
In-house teams can use market share tracking to:
- Report true organic market positioning to executives in language they understand
- Identify which competitors are gaining or losing share and why
- Set realistic targets for market share growth based on competitive data
- Justify SEO investments by showing market share ROI
For in-house teams, market share data can transform executive reporting. Instead of complex SEO metrics, you can lead with market share positioning and competitive movement—metrics that C-suite executives immediately understand and value.
For Agencies
Agencies leverage market share tracking to:
- Demonstrate client positioning relative to the entire competitive landscape
- Show clear ROI by highlighting market share gains over time
- Identify strategic opportunities based on competitor weaknesses
- Benchmark performance across different markets and industries
Agencies can use market share data as the centerpiece of quarterly client reviews, showing exactly how much market share the client has captured and which competitors are most vulnerable to further gains.
Why SiteCurve’s Approach to Share of Voice Stands Apart
While Share of Voice isn’t a metric unique to SiteCurve—many traditional SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and BrightEdge offer some version of it—our implementation is fundamentally different in ways that matter for strategic decision-making.
The Limitations of Traditional Share of Voice
Traditional keyword tracking tools typically calculate Share of Voice in one of two limited ways:
- Pre-selected competitor approach: You manually select a handful of competitors, and the tool calculates your Share of Voice relative to just those sites
- Visibility score approach: The tool calculates an abstract “visibility score” based on your rankings, but doesn’t show the complete competitive distribution
Both approaches miss the crucial context of the entire competitive landscape. They can tell you your Share of Voice is 15%, but they can’t comprehensively show who owns the other 85% or how that distribution is changing without requiring multiple reports and manual data combination.
The Landscape Advantage
SiteCurve’s landscape tracking approach solves this problem by:
- Capturing the entire SERP: We track all domains ranking for your keywords, not just pre-selected competitors
- Automatic competitive discovery: New competitors are automatically included in Share of Voice calculations as they appear
- Complete market share distribution: You can see exactly how the entire market breaks down, who’s gaining, and who’s losing
- Integrated categorization: Share of Voice is cross-referenced with site types and business models for deeper insights
Practical Impact on Strategic Decision-Making
The difference isn’t just academic—it transforms how you use Share of Voice data:
- No more blind spots: Discover competitors you didn’t know to track
- Simplified reporting: Access complete market share distribution in a single dashboard, rather than combining multiple data sources
- True market context: Understand your performance relative to the entire market, not just selected competitors
- Trend identification: Spot which types of sites are collectively gaining or losing share across your landscape
By integrating Share of Voice with our landscape approach, SiteCurve delivers a more comprehensive, accurate, and actionable view of your market position. This combination speeds up competitive analysis and provides insights that would otherwise require hours of manual data processing across multiple platforms.
1. Domain Authority vs. Market Share Analysis
Our Curve Score metric measures how well sites perform relative to their Domain Authority (via Moz). This reveals which competitors are outperforming what their authority would suggest—often a sign of strong content strategy or technical excellence.
The insights here are invaluable: sites with high market share but low domain authority are doing something right and deserve your attention. Conversely, if you have high domain authority but low market share, you’re likely underperforming and have significant growth potential.
2. Volatility Analysis
Market share isn’t static. Understanding volatility—how frequently and dramatically rankings change—helps you identify competitors with unstable positions and market segments that present opportunity.
SiteCurve’s Volatility Score measures this across your landscape, highlighting where you might have vulnerabilities or where competitors might be vulnerable to your advances.
3. SERP Feature Impact
Google’s increasing insertion of its own features into search results directly impacts market share. Our Google Score measures how prominent these features are across your keyword set and how they’re affecting organic market share distribution.
This data can help you determine whether to pivot your strategy toward featured snippet optimization if you discover how much potential traffic is being captured by these SERP features.
Integrating Market Share Tracking with Your Strategy
Here’s how to make market share tracking a central part of your SEO approach:
- Start with a comprehensive keyword landscape (we recommend at least 250-500 keywords for accurate market share measurement)
- Identify your current market position and set realistic growth targets
- Analyze market leaders to understand what’s driving their success
- Monitor share shifts weekly and correlate them with your strategy changes
- Report market share metrics to stakeholders as a primary KPI
The beauty of the SiteCurve approach is that your market share tracking automatically becomes more comprehensive over time as we capture new competitors entering your space. Unlike traditional competitors where you must manually add each site to track, our landscape approach ensures you’re always seeing the complete competitive picture.
Conclusion: Share of Voice as the North Star Market Share Metric
In a world of increasingly complex SEO metrics, market share stands out as a clear, business-relevant measure of performance. It answers the fundamental question that executives and clients care about most: “How much of the available opportunity do we own, and is that share growing?”
By shifting from traditional keyword tracking to landscape-based market share analysis, you gain a powerful strategic advantage—the ability to see the entire competitive landscape, understand relative positioning, and make data-driven decisions based on what’s actually working in your market.
If you’re ready to transform how you measure, track, and grow your organic market share, I invite you to explore what SiteCurve can do for your business. The clarity it provides might just change how you think about SEO strategy altogether.
Curious to see your true market share? Request a demo and discover how SiteCurve can transform your competitive intelligence.
