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How SiteCurve Tracks Keywords And Where The Data Comes From
How SiteCurve Tracks Keywords And Where The Data Comes From
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Written by Nikola Nikolovski
Updated over 3 weeks ago

When you create a landscape, each keyword in SiteCurve is stored as a unique combination of four elements:

  • The keyword phrase itself (e.g., "best running shoes")

  • Device type (desktop or mobile)

  • Language (e.g., English)

  • Location (e.g., United States)

For example:

Combination 1: "best running shoes" + desktop + English + United States 
Combination 2: "best running shoes" + mobile + English + United States

These count as two separate keywords in your tracking allowance.


Daily Rank Tracking Process

  • Data Collection (1 AM EST)

    • System pulls fresh ranking data for all tracked keywords in your landscape

    • Rankings refresh daily at 1 AM EST though might not appear in your account until later in the day

    • Captures top 20 organic rankings

    • Records all SERP features (AI Overview, People Also Ask, etc.)

  • Score Calculations

    • Estimated traffic is calculated using a traditional click curve for organic rankings (more on this below)

    • SERP feature visibility calculated using equal weighting

    • Volatility scores updated based on ranking changes

    • Google scores recalculated for SERP feature presence

  • Data Storage

    • New daily snapshot created

    • Historical trends updated

    • Winners and losers leaderboards are updated

    • Any alerts that are setup are triggered based on this performance


SiteCurve Keyword Data Sources

SiteCurve has ‘sourced’ data and ‘calculated’ data.

Sourced Data

Sourced data is anything SiteCurve needs to collect either by scraping or from 3rd party APIs sources, or AI models.


Keyword Ranking Data: SiteCurve sources its ranking data directly from the search results each day with multiple redundant systems in place to ensure 100% accurate and reliable data each day

  • Monthly Search Volume (MSV) Data: SiteCurve sources from Google keyword planner

  • Cost Per Click (CPC) data: SiteCurve sources CPC data from Google keyword planner

  • Domain Authority (DA): SiteCurve uses the Moz’s API to for the ‘Domain Authority’ metric

  • Category/Niche: During the landscape creation process SiteCurve uses an AI model to assign a category and niche to the keyword

  • Website Type/Business Model: When SiteCurve extract URLs from the search results, SiteCurve uses an AI model to look at the content of the URL and assign the most likely website type and business model. Multiple website types and business models can be assigned to a given url.

Calculated data

Calculated data is anything SiteCurve creates within the platform.

  • Estimated Traffic: This is a calculated metric using a traditional click-through-rate curve model to calculate estimated traffic to a domain for organic listings (not widgets)

  • Share of Voice % (SoV): This is a calculated metric where we take the estimated traffic a domain has and compare it to the total traffic across all domains giving you a ‘share of voice %’ which indicates how much of the market a domain owns.

  • Domain Data (i.e., keywords, urls): SiteCurve aggregates all of the ranking data to showcase how many keywords are ranking and on which urls across each domain

  • Curve Score: A normalized score (0-100) that measures how well a site performs in search relative to its domain authority, where higher scores indicate a site is outperforming what would be expected based on its authority level.

  • Google Score: A normalized score (0-100) reflecting how prominent Google's own SERP features (like AI Overview boxes, Featured Snippets, and Knowledge Panels) are across your tracked keywords.

  • Volatility Score: A normalized score (0-100) measuring the stability of a site's rankings, where higher scores indicate more frequent and dramatic position changes across tracked keywords.


What SiteCurve Tracks Each Day

SiteCurve tracks and collects 100s of data points each day to build the winners and losers reports. With this data SiteCurve shows the winners and losers for the traditional organic rankings but also every single SERP feature.


Organic Listings

  • SiteCurve uses a traditional click-through-rate curve model to calculate estimated traffic and share of voice for each domain (seen below)

Rank

CTR

1

38.19%

2

15.88%

3

8.55%

4

5.04%

5

3.75%

6

2.61%

7

2.13%

8

1.72%

9

1.40%

10

1.27%

11

1.22%

12

1.08%

13

.98%

14

.90%

15

.85%

16

.80%

17

.74%

18

.70%

19

.62%

20

.33%

21+

0%

  • Higher positions weighted more heavily (e.g., position #1 worth significantly more than position #5)

  • This reflects real-world user behavior where top positions receive exponentially more clicks than lower positions

  • SiteCurve than combines position weight with monthly search volume (from Google Keyword Planner) for total visibility impact

Let's say we're tracking two keywords:

  1. "best running shoes" (10,000 monthly searches)

  2. "running shoe reviews" (5,000 monthly searches)

For a website that ranks:

  • Position #1 for "best running shoes" (38.19% weight)

  • Position #5 for "running shoe reviews" (3.75% weight)

The calculation would be:

"best running shoes" = 10,000 × 0.3819 = 3,819 traffic "running shoe reviews" = 5,000 × 0.0375 = 187 traffic Total = 4,000 traffic

This shows how:

  • Ranking #1 for a high-volume keyword (3,819 traffic) contributes far more to visibility than ranking #5 for a medium-volume keyword (187 traffic)

  • The click curve heavily weights top positions to reflect real user behavior

  • Final visibility combines both ranking position and search volume

SERP Features & Widgets

  • Unlike the organic listings, SiteCurve does not support estimated traffic for SERP Features and Widgets. Instead SiteCurve only supports Share of Voice % where all positions within SERP features (AI Overview, People Also Ask, etc.) are weighted equally with no click curve

  • Each appearance counts the same regardless of position

  • While not a perfect representation of user behavior, this provides a clear picture of which sites appear most frequently

  • Helps identify winners and losers in special SERP features without position bias

For example:

  • A site appearing 100 times in People Also Ask boxes (regardless of position) would have more visibility than a site appearing 50 times

  • This equal weighting helps track pure visibility in these features, though actual user interaction may vary


Data Storage & History

Historical Data

  • Business plans: Unlimited historical data

  • Starter plans: 3 months of data

  • Daily snapshots preserved

  • Trend analysis capabilities

Data Aggregation

System automatically aggregates data at:

  • Domain level

  • Subfolder level

  • Category level

  • Location level

  • Device type level


System Reliability

Uptime & Monitoring

  • 99.9% tracking reliability

  • Continuous system monitoring

  • Automated error detection

  • Backup data preservation

Data Quality Checks

  • Duplicate detection

  • Invalid data filtering

  • Anomaly detection

  • Consistency verification


Usage & Limits

Tracking Limits

  • Business accounts: Up to 100K keywords per landscape

  • Enterprise accounts: Up to 1M keywords per landscape

  • No limit on number of landscapes

  • Additional keywords available for purchase

Remember: SiteCurve's tracking system is designed to provide reliable, daily updated data while maintaining accuracy and completeness across all your keywords.

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