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

7 points by forgot_password ↗ HN
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

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mattgratt
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.
apowell
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.