

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

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.<p>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?
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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.

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

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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.

