Ask HN: Formula for better measuring improvements in SERP position over time?

7 pointsby forgot_password15년 전3 comments

Our startup is constantly focused on improving our SERP position for key, transactional terms. However, measuring progress on a weekly basis across thousands of terms can be a challenge. Moving from SERP position 45 to 40 is way easier than moving from 6 to 1, and this makes it challenging to determine holistically how much we are improving on a weekly basis across thousands of terms.

One can imagine that the SERP position vs. difficulty graph looks like 1/x where the y-axis is difficulty and the x-axis is SERP position. Thus, measuring improvement would involve summing 1/$current_serp_position - 1/$previous_serp_position for each term. This is obviously very crude, has anyone come up with a more refined and accurate way to measure this?

3 comments

apowell15년 전

It's a bit noisier than pure SERP position, but tracking actual weekly traffic from transactional keywords should naturally normalize the value of SERP gains across keywords of differing popularity and rank.

flavy15년 전

There is a whole literature about it. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounted_Cumulative_Gain

mattgratt15년 전

Not entirely sure what you're asking here, but if you're trying to measure keyword difficulty, keyword rank, and their intersection, SEOMoz has tools w/ APIs for this.