SISTRIX Visibility Index and How to weekly monitor it for 10+ directories using Google Sheets
with a free example spreadsheet
What is SISTRIX Visibility Index?
Visibility Index is a metric invented by SISTRIX — a German SEO Tool, to reflect the visibility of a domain on Google SERP. The metric is available in 30 countries, for both mobile and desktop. To calculate this metric, SISTRIX:
- records top 100 results for 1 million keywords, which makes up 100*1,000,000 = 100 million data points
- they then weight each data point by the search volume of the keywords and the click probability of the measured ranking position. Position seven on a highly-searched keyword can have a higher weight than position one on a rarely-searched keyword.
- finally, the weighted values for all rankings of a domain are added up to form the Visibility Index.
To understand the concept better, let’s look at a fiction example. Say we have domain A that ranks number 1 for the keyword “best SEO tool that will help boost your ranking” (search volume =1000) and ranks number 3 for “your top 10 free SEO tools” (search volume = 10,000). Suppose that a search volume of 1000 has 1 point, a search volume of 10000 has 10 points, position 1 has click probability = 60% and position 3 has click probability = 8%, then the Visibility Index of domain A will be 1*60% + 10*8% = 1.4
That means the higher your domain ranks for the more-searched keywords, the higher your Visibility Index will be.
Why SISTRIX Visibility Index is helpful and what is it for?
The SISTRIX Visibility Index is helpful since it eliminates all the external factors such as weather, season, vacation times, etc on your traffic, and as such can be a reliable metric to:
- measure the success of your SEO strategy. If you were to introduce a new SEO strategy, e.g changing how to generate page title and meta description, it would be useful to see if there is any change in your Visibility Index.
- see how Google Updates affect your rankings on Google SERP.
- objectively compare yourself with the competitors
Take a look here if you want to know about SISTRIX Visibility Index in detail. You can either quickly check for your domain Visibility Index without an account here or create a free account in SISTRIX to get more data.
How to monitor SISTRIX Visibility Index for multiple directories using Google Sheets
While the SISTRIX built-in dashboard is a great place to get an overview for your directories, sometimes it can involve quite some manual work, or sometimes you might want to combine the SISTRIX Visibility Index data with your own internal data. To do that, Google Sheets would be a suitable choice of tool.
This tutorial introduces a way to use Google Spreadsheets to:
- Get historical Sistrix Visibility Index for any directory
- Update the index of the added directories weekly
- Automatically create and update the Sistrix Visibility Index charts for all directories group by countries
SISTRIX API and the credit system
In order to connect from Google Spreadsheets to Sistrix, their API can be used. You can obtain the API key for yourself as instructed here.
One important feature to keep in mind when you need to monitor the indexes for many websites is that the SISTRIX API operates with a credit system. Per each toolbox module subscribed, you have a maximum of 10,000 credits each week, and the credits are refilled every week when the day changes from Sunday to Monday. To check how many credits you have in total and how many are left, use:
https://api.sistrix.com/credits?format=json&api_key=When it comes to the visibility index, you can get the index for the most recent date using the API request:
https://api.sistrix.com/domain.sichtbarkeitsindex?format=json&api_key=API_KEY&path=YOUR_DIRECTORY&country=COUNTRYand to get the indexes for all the dates since Sistrix has data available for your directory, add the &history=true parameter to the above request.
Now it’s worth mentioning that, for each date that the Sistrix API returns the visibility index, 1 credit is taken. That means, for example, if your website/ directory has been around for a long time and data of your visibility index has been gathered from 01–01–2018 to now (say, 01–07–2021), then with the historical visibility index request 1277 credits will be taken. If you have 10 similar directories, 1277*10 = 12770 credits will be used, which exceeds the 10,000 credit limit.
As such, the IMPORTRANGE method as suggested by Sistrix themselves will not be the best solution in this case, since the formula will always call for all the historical dates and the credits will soon be used up. Instead, to get all the available Visibility Index for all of your desired directories, the approach would be:
- Get ALL the data the first time a directory is added, then create a chart for all directories in one country (when grouping the directories/ domains in one country into one chart, you will be able to compare the Visibility Index of all the directories with each other)
- Get ONLY the most recent data weekly for all added directories
The Spreadsheet
The example spreadsheet of how to monitor the Sistrix Visibility Index can be found here. The sheet works as follows:
- Input your API key, the country, and the link to your directory to the Input sheet.
- Press “Get historical visibility data”. The underlying script will do the following steps:
- If there is NOT already a sheet for the added country, a new country sheet will be added (otherwise the created country sheet will be updated)
- In the country sheet, the date of visibility index, the visibility index value, and the directory are added to columns A, B, C respectively
- Then create a pivot table with the date as rows and the directories as columns
- Then create a country chart on the “Visibility Overview” sheet, based on the pivot table data
- Every week at 9 am on Monday, the new Visibility Index data will be added to the bottom of the country sheet and the above steps are repeated.
Below is the detailed script.
Please note that I am not an advanced programmer, thus my writing style might not be the shortest way to do complete the above actions. However, I wrote it in a way that’s easy for me to understand and I hope it is for you as well. I also leave many comments in the code such that you get to know what each line of the code does, in case you are a beginner and want to modify the code to meet your need.
If you find what I wrote is helpful in any way, please leave a clap or comment so that I have more motivations to write similar content.
Thank you for reading ❤
