Keywords and lists

Adding keywords

Keywords → Add keywords. Paste as many as you like, one per line or comma-separated. Duplicates within the paste and against what you already track are removed automatically.

Before writing anything, PicoRank checks the slot cost. If the addition would exceed your allowance you are told the exact numbers — how many slots are in use, how many the addition needs — rather than a generic refusal.

Choosing keywords that are worth tracking

Every keyword you add is fetched every week, in every geography and on every device your scans cover. So:

• Track terms you would act on. If you would not change anything based on the position, the measurement is decoration.
• Include your brand. Cheap, and losing your own name is worth knowing about immediately.
• Prefer specific over broad. "Ice cream" is unwinnable and uninformative; "gelato södermalm" is both winnable and diagnostic.
• Prune. A keyword that has sat outside the top 50 for six months is spending slots to tell you nothing new.

Suggestions

Generate suggestions reads your site's actual content and proposes terms it appears to be about. If Search Console is connected, terms you already receive impressions for are included — those are the strongest candidates, because they are measured rather than guessed.

Suggestions are a starting point. Review them; they do not know your business.

Lists

Every domain has a Default list, and you can add more. Lists exist because scans point at a list — so lists are how you give different keyword groups different treatment. Common splits: brand vs non-brand, product lines, or a small "watch closely" set scanned across more cities than the rest.

The default list cannot be deleted. Delete its keywords instead.

Labels

Labels are colour-coded tags for filtering and grouping in reports — funnel stage, product category, priority. Labels belong to a domain, so the same keyword can be labelled differently on two sites, and a label used for one site does not clutter another.

Casing

Matching is case-insensitive, but the casing you typed is what you see. Add "GDPR compliance" and that is how it appears in the app and in every report — it is not flattened to lower case just because that is how it is matched.

Removing keywords

Removing stops future scanning and hides the keyword from results; the history is retained. The freed slots become available at the end of the billing month rather than instantly — otherwise removing and re-adding would be a way around the capacity you paid for. The app shows held capacity as "reserved" so the number is never a mystery.