How to Make Candlestick Charts for Keyword Rankings [SEO]
This post is a part of the Google Search Console Feature Engineering Series.
Full disclosure: I’m not a finance expert. If you know how to read these graphs, you’ll be able to get much more insight out of them.
What are Candlestick Charts
If you’re not familiar with them, Candlestick Charts show the evolution of a stock over a period of time. In this post, we’ll analyze them from an SEO approach.
How to Read a Candlestick Chart
They show the lowest and highest values for a time period, if the trend is increasing or decreasing, etc.
Each candlestick shows weekly ranking information for the keyword we’re analyzing.
Open Position: Shows the keyword position at the beginning of the week
High Position: Shows the week’s best position for the keyword
Low Position: Shows the week’s worst position for the keyword
Close Position: Shows the keyword position for the end of the week
Green Candlesticks show a keyword improves its ranking in the week and Red Candlesticks show the opposite.
The candle’s “wick” or “shadow” shows the high and low positions for the week. If the top part of candle wick’s is short, it means that the Open Position was near the Best weekly value. If the upper shadow is short on a green candle, it means that the week closed near the best weekly value.
Long shadows show lots of Ranking Volatility during the week; Short shadows show stable Rankings during the week.
Note: Keep in mind that in SEO Keyword Rankings, a low value is a good value (1st place is higher than 10th place). So ‘high position’ would be the week’s lowest number and ‘low position’ would be the week’s highest number.
How to Obtain Candlestick Chart Data
In order to get the data required to create these type of charts, we’ll use the Google Search Console API.
We’re want to get the daily position for a specific keyword for every day of the year separately. Keep in mind that GSC averages out data for date ranges, that’s why we get daily values.
Due to the fact that Search Console only gives one position number a day, we’re going to look at weekly rankings in order to track position variations or volatility.
We need to get the Week Number for each date, the Weekday, and get the Open, High, Low, and Close values.
Open Position: The keyword’s position for Monday in that week
High Position: The lowest position for that week. Remember that a lower position number is something positive in SEO rankings.
Low Position: The highest position for that week.
Close Position: The keyword’s position for Sunday in that week
For the graph, I used Python’s Pyplot interface.
Candlestick Patterns
In order to get the most amount of insights from your Keyword Ranking Evolution graphs, make sure to study up on Candlestick Patterns.
This area is beyond the scope of what I feel comfortable explaining, so I’ll leave to you to do some online research. :-)
Conclusion
Using Candlestick Charts to track Keyword Rankings can provide useful insights.
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Make sure to check out my Google Search Console Feature Engineering Series for other SEO metrics and to follow me for more original SEO related content.
Happy rankings!
