Choosing the Keywords We Track

Where to Add Your Keywords

Open Rankings from the menu down the left of your dashboard and scroll to the panel headed Keyword Tracking. It is a box to type a phrase into and an Add keyword button beside it, with your list above. You can add up to 50 phrases, one at a time.

Nothing is looked up until at least one is saved, so this is the first thing worth doing after you subscribe. The first positions arrive the following morning.

Looking for where we search from — the town or country the numbers describe? That is the same panel, below your list, headed Where We Search From: set it here.

What Makes a Good Phrase

The useful phrases are the ones a customer types when they have decided to buy and are choosing who from. They are usually shorter than you expect and plainer than your trade’s own vocabulary.

• Type what a customer types, not what you would write. A dentist writes “restorative dentistry”. The person looking for one types “chipped tooth repair”. Track the second.
• Include the place, if place is how people choose you. “emergency plumber tacoma” is a different result list from “emergency plumber”, and only one of them is a customer you can serve.
• One idea per phrase. Two services in one phrase gives you a number that means neither.
• Cover what you actually sell, not what you wish you sold. A phrase you have no page for will sit at the bottom, and the honest reading of that is that you have no page for it — which is useful, but only once.

If you want to know how many people actually type a phrase before you commit a slot to it, the Keyword Research screen will tell you, and it is included.

Set Where We Search From

Under your list of keywords is a section headed Where We Search From. Google shows different results in different places, so this decides what every rank number on your dashboard actually means.

Pick your country, then add the town your customers are in — not the town your web company is in. Leave the town empty to measure across the whole country. Until you save it, we use a guess based on your web address, and the screen says so rather than passing the guess off as your choice.

What Happens After You Save

Positions are collected overnight, so a phrase added today gets its first number tomorrow. We look at the top 100 results. If your site is not in them, the screen shows a dash rather than a made-up number — that is a real answer, not missing data.

The AI Visibility screen also suggests questions for the AI assistants, built from these same phrases and phrased the way a customer would ask them. None of them is asked until you add it.

Adding and Removing Later

You add one phrase at a time rather than editing a block of text, and removing one takes two clicks so a mis-tap cannot delete a month of history. Add and remove whenever you like — there is no penalty and no waiting period.

Removing a phrase stops us looking it up. Positions we already collected for it are not shown once it is gone, so if you are only losing interest in a phrase for a while, leave it in the list rather than removing it and adding it back — that is what keeps the history.