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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?

I realized today that I've never purchased anything online via a Google paid search link. To me, it seems ridiculous to click on a paid search link when Google returns the best search results anyway. I imagine that I'm not alone among my friend group but obviously, millions of people buy off Adwords. Maybe the "average" American doesn't realize the difference between sponsored and organic results.

This may be addressed in previous threads but I could not find. I'm a "self-taught programmers" and jumped in by learning PHP and building stuff. I would not describe myself as computer-savvy and this was my intro to programming. I would like to improve my knowledge of the basics of the Internet and web development (e.x. HTTP overview, understanding web servers, how scripting languages are abstractions on lower-level languages, etc..)

Are there any good books that you guys have read? I know there are plenty of books on these topics individually but I was looking for something that tied these topics together and made it understandable / relevant for a novice