Most marketers staring at their share of voice dashboard are solving the wrong problem.
They see a percentage. It looks low. A competitor’s looks higher. Panic sets in.
Then they start chasing every keyword their competitor ranks for, running more Google Ads, and throwing budget at channels that have nothing to do with their actual buyers.
Sound familiar?
Here is what nobody tells you: a high share of voice number built on the wrong topics is worthless. It does not move revenue. It does not move market share. It just makes your dashboard look busier.
I have worked with B2B SaaS companies and venture-backed startups where the CMO came to me with exactly this problem. They had a competitive analysis report showing their brand versus competitors across hundreds of search terms. The numbers looked devastating.
But when we looked closer? The competitor was showing up for keywords that had zero relevance to their buyers. Informational fluff. Top-of-funnel noise.
That is the trap. And it is everywhere.
This guide is going to show you how to increase share of voice the right way: starting with the metrics that actually matter, building marketing strategies that compound over time, and ignoring the noise that distracts most brands from real progress.
What Is Share of Voice?
Share of voice (SOV) is a measurement of how a brand’s visibility compares to its competitors within a specific market or industry.
The formula is straightforward: Share of Voice = Your Brand Metrics / Total Market Metrics, multiplied by 100. This applies across all marketing channels, with slight variations in the specific metrics used.
So if your organic search traffic for a set of target keywords is 10,000 visits and the total organic search traffic across all competing sites for those same keywords is 50,000, your share of voice for that keyword group is 20%.
Clean formula. Easy to understand.
The problem? The formula only works if you feed it the right keywords. Put garbage in, you get garbage out. A 40% share of voice across 200 irrelevant keywords is not a win. A 15% share of voice across 10 high-intent, bottom-of-funnel terms that your buyers actually search? That is the one worth chasing.
A high share of voice is often seen as a leading indicator of brand recognition and authority, which can drive future market share growth. But brand recognition from people who will never buy from you is not worth measuring.
What Does Increase Share of Voice Mean?
When you increase share of voice, you are claiming a larger percentage of the conversations, searches, and impressions happening in your market.
For most B2B brands, the most valuable version of this is owning the bottom-funnel search terms where buyers are actively evaluating solutions. It means your brand stands where your best customers are looking. Not everywhere. For the specific topics and queries where your product is the right answer.
When share of voice grows in the right places, the downstream effects are predictable: more organic traffic from real buyers, better impression share on terms that convert, more brand mentions in industry conversations, and eventually, real market share growth. Understanding LLM vs traditional SEO is increasingly important here, because the channels driving visibility are shifting fast.
That is the version worth building.
Share of Voice vs. Market Share
These two metrics are related but distinct.
Share of voice measures brand visibility and awareness compared to competitors. It tracks how much of the conversation, the traffic, and the impressions your brand owns compared to total market metrics.
Market share measures the percentage of total sales your brand controls in its industry. It is about revenue, not visibility.
They move together over time. Research shows a 10% increase in share of voice can lead to a 0.5% growth in market share, indicating a direct relationship between visibility and sales performance. You build the first to drive the second.
The implication? Focus your share of voice efforts on the keywords, channels, and conversations your buyers actually use. That is how visibility becomes revenue.
What Is a Good Share of Voice Percentage?
Honest answer: it depends entirely on the competitiveness of your market.
In a highly consolidated market with two or three dominant players, a 15% share of voice might be genuinely strong. In a fragmented space with dozens of small competitors, 30% might be table stakes.
What matters more than chasing a specific percentage is the direction of your trend over time and whether you are measuring it against the right keyword list. If your share of voice is growing for high-intent commercial terms while competitors hold ground on informational content, you are winning even if their overall number looks bigger.
A good share of voice percentage is one that is increasing, tied to keywords with real buying intent, and benchmarked against your actual direct competitors rather than a tool-generated list that includes HubSpot because you both write about content marketing. This matters even more now that ChatGPT SEO has added a new layer to where your brand needs to show up.
The 5 Channels Where You Can Measure Share of Voice
Share of voice can be measured across various channels, including traditional media, digital advertising, social media, SEO, and earned media. Each requires specific metrics and tools for accurate assessment.
SEO Share of Voice
SEO share of voice measures the percentage of organic search traffic your site captures for a defined set of keywords compared to competitors.
To measure SEO share accurately, you need to pick the keywords that matter to your business, track your rankings for each one, and calculate your estimated traffic versus the total available across competing sites.
Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and SE Ranking automate this calculation. But here is the critical part: define your keyword set manually. Do not let the platform decide which terms you should be measuring. Pick the terms your buyers use when they are close to a decision.
Search visibility for the right terms matters infinitely more than search visibility across hundreds of irrelevant ones.
PPC Share of Voice (Impression Share)
For paid search, share of voice is measured as impression share. Google Ads reports this directly in your campaign dashboard.
Impression share is the percentage of eligible impressions your ads actually received. If your ads were eligible to show 10,000 times but only appeared 6,000 times, your impression share is 60%.
Your lost impression share is the flip side. It tells you how much eligible visibility you left on the table and why: either budget or ad rank.
Actionable steps to improve impression share include increasing bids, refining ad copy, and expanding keyword targeting to capture more relevant queries.
PPC share is one of the cleaner voice metrics to track because Google gives you the data directly. No estimation required.
Social Media Share of Voice
Social media SOV reflects consumer conversations across platforms, making it a valuable metric for understanding brand sentiment and audience perception.
Social SOV relies entirely on the volume and quality of public chatter about your brand. To measure social media share of voice, you need to track all types of social media mentions: full brand names, nicknames, product names, and relevant hashtags.
Social listening tools like Brandwatch or Sprout Social will pull this data across social media platforms and calculate your share of the total conversation in your space.
Sentiment analysis matters alongside raw volume. You want to understand not just how much your brand is mentioned in social media conversations but whether those mentions are positive, neutral, or negative.
Earned Media Share of Voice
Earned media share of voice measures how often your brand shows up in press coverage, industry publications, and third-party editorial content compared to competitors.
Media coverage in industry-relevant media outlets, media mentions in news stories, and inclusion in analyst reports all contribute to this metric. Media monitoring tools can track brand mentions across relevant media channels and give you a media share calculation over time.
Earned media is a massive driver of organic visibility. It also feeds SEO share because links from high-authority media outlets improve your organic search rankings over time.
Traditional Media Share of Voice
Traditional media share of voice tracks brand presence in broadcast, print, and out-of-home advertising. It is more relevant for consumer brands with large advertising budgets than for most B2B SaaS companies.
Voice measures in traditional media often rely on spending data and impression estimates rather than real-time tracking.
How to Increase Share of Voice: 8 Strategies That Work
Ready to get into the actual tactics? Here are the eight approaches that move the needle.
1. Build a Keyword List That Reflects Buyer Intent
This is the foundation of everything.
Before you run a single marketing campaign, you need a tight list of relevant keywords that reflect what your buyers search when they are close to making a decision. I am not talking about hundreds of keywords. I am talking about five to ten core terms that represent real commercial intent.
Every piece of content, every paid advertising dollar, every digital marketing effort should connect back to this list.
High-volume, relevant informational and commercial keywords should be targeted to improve brand visibility. But relevance comes first. Volume means nothing if the people searching that term will never become customers.
Use analytics tools to track your brand’s position on these terms over time, not the overall percentage your share of voice tools show by default. The best enterprise SEO tools will let you set up custom keyword groups so you are only measuring the terms that map to actual revenue.
2. Dominate Organic Search for Bottom-Funnel Terms
Organic search is a major component of digital visibility. And for B2B brands, it is where share of voice compounds the fastest because buyers are actively searching for solutions.
The play: rank in the top three positions for the terms your buyers use when they are evaluating options. That means decision-stage content: comparisons, case studies, use case pages, and content that answers the question “is this the right solution for me.”
When you rank at the top for relevant keywords, your SEO share of voice goes up automatically. You capture a larger slice of organic search traffic, which increases your brand’s share of the total market conversation.
Combine this with technical SEO fundamentals. Search engines need to find, crawl, and understand your content before any of the above matters.
Creating quality content means solving real buyer problems with depth and specificity, not producing generic posts that say the same thing as everyone else. That is how you grow organic traffic and brand visibility at the same time.
3. Run Google Ads to Own High-Value Terms Immediately
Organic search takes time. Google Ads give you speed.
If there are high-intent terms where you are not yet ranking organically, paid advertising bridges the gap. You can bid on those terms, show up immediately for your target audience, and start accumulating impression share while your organic visibility builds in the background.
Paid search impression share data is also some of the most useful competitive intelligence you will find. If your impression share on a critical term is 40% with a high lost impression share due to rank, you need better ad copy and landing page alignment. If the lost impression share is due to budget, you know where to invest more.
Do not run paid search alone. Consider online advertising across the specific channels where your buyers spend time. For B2B, that might mean combining Google Ads with LinkedIn digital advertising for full-funnel coverage. The best enterprise SaaS SEO agencies typically run paid and organic in lockstep so neither channel is working in isolation.
4. Build Topical Authority With Deep Content
A content strategy is not a content calendar. A content calendar tells you what to publish and when. A content strategy tells you why you are publishing it and how it connects to your brand’s position in the market.
Topical authority is what happens when your site comprehensively covers a set of themes that matter to your buyers. When you go deeper than anyone else on the topics where your best customers make decisions, search engines recognize you as a trusted source and surface your content more often.
This is how you grow SEO share of voice at scale. Not by chasing every keyword in your niche, but by going deeper on the topics where your buyers are making decisions.
Topic clusters are the structural approach. A pillar page covers the broad topic. Supporting content covers every subtopic. Internal links connect them. The result is a section of your site that owns a piece of the market conversation.
Publish original research and unique data points. This is what separates brands that lead industry conversations from brands that follow them. It is also what earns high-quality backlinks and organic media coverage without you having to ask.
5. Use Digital PR to Earn Brand Mentions and Media Coverage
This is one of the fastest ways to improve brand visibility and earned media share simultaneously.
Digital PR means publishing original research or newsworthy content that earns coverage in industry publications and media outlets. When journalists and bloggers cite your data, they create brand mentions that build both brand reputation and domain authority.
The compounding effect is significant. More high-quality media coverage leads to more citations, which improves your standing with search engines, which improves your organic search rankings, which increases your SEO share of voice.
Press releases still work for distributing announcements to traditional media and media outlets. But the real leverage comes from creating something genuinely interesting that media channels want to cover without being asked. Original data, contrarian insights, and useful tools earn media mentions naturally.
This is also the most sustainable way to improve your brand’s presence in AI-powered search, where systems increasingly rely on authoritative coverage as trust signals. The specific LLM ranking factors that determine which brands get cited point directly back to earned authority from high-quality sources.
6. Build Your Social Media Share of Voice
Social media SOV is about more than posting regularly. It is about being present in the relevant conversations your buyers are having.
Use social listening tools to monitor industry hashtags, competitor brand names, and relevant conversations across social platforms. Identify where the market conversation is happening and show up there with a genuine perspective.
Social media share of voice improves when you create share-worthy content that resonates with your target audience and encourages them to share it with their networks.
Pay attention to what people are saying about you on social media platforms. Are they recommending you to peers? Are they citing your content in relevant conversations? Those signals indicate real brand authority.
Encourage user generated content when possible. Authentic content from customers often reaches further than branded content and amplifies your brand’s share of voice organically across social platforms.
7. Fix Your Google Ads Impression Share Leaks
If you are running paid search marketing campaigns, impression share is a direct lever you can pull today.
Open your Google Ads account. Look at your impression share by campaign and by keyword. Find your lost impression share column for your highest-value terms.
If you are losing impression share due to budget, you have a straightforward decision: increase spend or narrow targeting to concentrate your budget on the best terms.
If you are losing impression share due to rank, the fix requires improving your Quality Score. That means better ad copy relevance, stronger landing page alignment, and a higher expected click-through rate.
Every percentage point of lost impression share you recover on core terms is a direct increase in your PPC share of voice. And because the data is real-time, this is one of the fastest feedback loops in your entire share of voice strategy.
8. Track Share of Voice by Channel and Adjust Continuously
Tracking and continuously adjusting your marketing efforts is essential to growing SOV over time.
The typical pattern most brands follow: set up a dashboard, check the overall share of voice percentage once a quarter, get uneasy when it looks low, and react by chasing whatever the competitor is doing. That is a reactive loop, not a strategy.
Instead, use voice tools and media monitoring tools to measure share at the channel level. Track your SEO share separately from your PPC share separately from your social media SOV separately from your earned media share. For AI search specifically, I use Promptwatch to monitor citations across LLMs and track when and how my brand gets surfaced in AI responses.
This gives you voice data that is actually actionable. If your impression share on paid terms is strong but your SEO share is weak, you know where to invest. If your social media share is growing but your media mentions are flat, digital PR needs attention.
Regular monitoring of share of voice helps brands benchmark business performance against competitors, revealing gaps in strategy and opportunities to outperform rivals.
Add sentiment analysis to your tracking. Voice measures that ignore sentiment can give you a misleading picture. Lots of brand mentions from people complaining is worse than fewer mentions from people actively recommending you.
How to Measure Share of Voice Across Channels
Measuring share of voice accurately requires the right tools and a consistent methodology.
Here is a quick overview of how to measure share across each channel.
How to Measure SEO Share
To measure SEO share, pull your estimated organic search traffic for your target keyword set. Compare it against the combined traffic of all competing sites ranking for those same terms. The ratio is your SEO share of voice percentage.
You can do this manually using keyword research tools or automatically with platforms like SE Ranking, Ahrefs, or Semrush, which calculate SEO share as a built-in metric.
How to Measure PPC Share
Impression share is the PPC share metric Google Ads reports directly. You do not need a third-party tool. Navigate to your campaign or keyword level reporting, add the impression share column, and read the number.
Monitor your lost impression share column alongside it. This tells you exactly how much eligible visibility you missed and why.
How to Measure Social Media SOV
Social media SOV requires social listening tools or media monitoring tools. Set up tracking for your brand name, product names, and relevant hashtags. Pull competitor data for the same terms. Calculate your share of the total mentions volume. For local brands, Local Falcon’s rank tracker adds a geographic layer so you can see how your visibility shifts by neighborhood or city.
Most social listening tools automate this and give you a dashboard with social media SOV trends over time.
How to Measure Earned Media Share
Track brand mentions in news sources, blogs, and industry publications using media monitoring tools. Compare the volume and reach of your coverage against competitors in the same media outlets.
This gives you a media share benchmark you can track over time and use to evaluate the impact of digital PR marketing campaigns.
The 3 3 3 Rule in Marketing
The 3 3 3 rule in marketing is a framework suggesting brands should reach customers through three messages, across three marketing channels, at three different times.
Applied to share of voice, the 3 3 3 rule reinforces why measuring SOV across multiple channels matters. A brand that shows up in organic search, in paid advertising, and in earned media simultaneously has a compounding visibility advantage over a brand that only invests in one channel.
If your target audience encounters your brand in organic search, then sees a relevant Google Ads result, and then reads about you in a trusted industry publication, your brand’s position in their consideration set is dramatically stronger.
This is why coordinating your content strategy, your paid advertising, and your digital PR efforts around the same core themes gives you a unified brand’s presence that drives share of voice across multiple touch points. Industry leaders in any market are consistently visible across all three. If you want that kind of coordinated presence built for AI search specifically, that is exactly what my LLM SEO agency does.
Wrapping Up
Share of voice is one of the most powerful metrics in digital marketing when it is used correctly.
Used incorrectly, it sends marketing teams chasing competitors across topics that have nothing to do with their buyers. A brand that owns the market conversation on the terms that matter to its target audience will always outperform a brand chasing a high-volume number built on irrelevant keywords.
Define the market conversation your brand stands for. Build a keyword list that reflects real purchase intent. Track your brand’s share of that specific conversation, stay consistent with your marketing strategies, and watch your market share follow.
If you want help building an SEO and content strategy that grows your share of voice on the terms that actually drive revenue, head to brandonleuangpaseuth.com/apply to see if we are a fit.
