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PicoRank Docs
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Quickstart

From signing up to your first ranking data — about ten minutes of work, then a wait.

1. Create an account

Sign up at https://app.picorank.com. You will get a confirmation email; the account is not usable until you click it. If it has not arrived in a few minutes, check spam — and if it is genuinely missing, use "resend" on the login page rather than signing up again, which would create a second account.

2. Onboarding

The wizard collects the minimum needed to produce data, and each step is saved as you go:

  1. Your name — used in reports and emails.
  2. Company — the account everything belongs to. Colleagues you invite join this.
  3. Domain — the site to track. See Domains for path-scoped outlets.
  4. Keywords — paste your own, or generate suggestions from your site's content. Suggestions are a starting point, not an answer; prune them.
  5. First scan — pick a geography and a device.

When you finish, the first scan is queued immediately. Data usually appears within minutes, but a large keyword set takes longer.

3. While the first scan runs

Ranking data has no shortcuts: we have to actually fetch the search results. Until the first scan completes, results pages will say so rather than showing zeros — a position of "not found" and "not measured yet" are different facts and we will not blur them.

Meanwhile, worth doing:

  • Add competitors (how). They are measured on your keywords at no extra cost, and their history is back-filled from results already collected — so they appear with context immediately rather than in a week.
  • Connect Search Console (how). It gives real impressions and clicks, which makes estimates unnecessary where measurements exist.
  • Start a crawl so Site optimization has something to analyse.

4. Reading the first results

Go to SEO results. The first run is a baseline, not a trend — one measurement cannot tell you direction. Positions move for reasons unconnected to anything you did, so what matters is the pattern over several weeks. See Reading SEO results.

5. Settle into a cadence

Scans run weekly by default, and also whenever you change what is tracked. You can trigger an extra run at any time, within limits that stop a loop from running up your bill.

6. Automate it

Everything above is available over the API. Create a key under Settings → API keys and read the API overview. Point your first integration at the sandbox — same code, staging data, no production consequences.