WYN Score

WYN is an opportunity score, not an effort score. It ranks the keywords in your set by how much visibility you stand to gain if you actually improve rank on them — so the keywords surfaced at the top of your dashboard are the ones where moving rank pays back the most clicks per unit of work.

Under the hood, the score is a function of three inputs: your current rank, the keyword’s monthly search volume, and a per-position CTR decay curve. The implementation lives in backend/app/core/national_rank/opportunity.py: POSITION_CTR is the per-rank CTR table, expected_monthly_impressions() converts a rank + volume pair into a forecasted monthly impression count, and opportunity_score() computes the delta between “current visibility” and “visibility if you moved into the top 3” — that delta is WYN.

Click-through rate is not linear in rank position. A page going from rank 11 to rank 5 picks up roughly 4× the click share. A page going from rank 30 to rank 24 picks up effectively nothing — both positions earn vanity-tier CTR past the first page. An average-rank metric averages those two situations to look identical, but the business impact is wildly different.

WYN respects the CTR curve. A keyword sitting at rank 11 with 5,000 monthly searches scores higher than a keyword at rank 30 with 50,000 monthly searches in most cases — even though the second keyword has 10× the volume, the work to move it onto page 1 is far larger and the realized impression gain at the destination position is much smaller. Optimizing by WYN steers your effort toward the near-page-1 opportunities that compound fast.

The POSITION_CTR dictionary maps rank positions 1-20 to an estimated organic click-through rate, with a single fallback for ranks 21+ where the noise gets too high to model per-position. The source is industry-standard CTR-by-position research, specifically the public Sistrix curves from the “Why almost everything you knew about Google CTR is no longer valid” 2020 study and its follow-ups, with minor smoothing.

We refresh quarterly. Treat the table as industry-average rather than per-niche forecasting — desktop vs mobile, branded vs unbranded, and SERP feature density (an AI Overview at the top of the SERP suppresses below-fold CTR materially) all shift these numbers. WYN is calibrated as a relative ranking signal across your keyword set; the absolute impression-delta number is directionally correct, not a literal forecast.

WYN drives the prioritization in our P-7 multi-select “Track N” flow. When you open the suggest dialog on a competitor or a discovered keyword set, the candidate keywords come back sorted by WYN — so the keywords you scan first are the ones where the next 90 days of work delivers the biggest visibility delta. You can override the sort, but the default is opportunity-weighted because that’s the question 90% of operators are trying to answer when they open that dialog.

The same scoring runs against your existing tracked set, which is why the dashboard surfaces “you should focus on these 5 keywords this month” rather than asking you to manually compare rank positions against volumes. WYN does the comparison; the dashboard surfaces the answer.

Most legacy SEO tools ship a “keyword difficulty” score: a 0-100 estimate of how hard it is to rank for a keyword, usually based on the strength of the pages currently ranking. That scores the effort. WYN scores the outcome — the visibility delta you actually realize if you do the work.

Difficulty and opportunity often diverge. A high-difficulty, high-volume head term might score poorly on WYN because the marginal improvement from rank 30 to rank 15 still earns trivial click share — even though the effort to make that move is real. Conversely, a low-difficulty long-tail keyword sitting at rank 11 might score very high on WYN because the next 6 positions of improvement bring you onto page 1 and out of vanity-CTR territory. We’re outcome-focused on purpose; difficulty is interesting context but it’s the wrong primary sort.