Keyword tiers and weights
Four tiers decide how heavily each keyword counts in your averages. The Explorer suggests them for every search, and you can change any of them.
By default every keyword would count the same. That is rarely true of the business behind them: one term might carry a third of your revenue while another is a nice-to-have.
Tiers let you say so.
The four tiers
Every keyword sits in one of four tiers:
- Core (×5): the terms your product lives on
- Important (×3): meaningful, not decisive
- Standard (×1): the default
- Minor (×0.3): tracked for awareness, barely moving the averages
The multiplier is shown on each keyword chip; Standard shows a slider icon instead. A Core keyword moves your averages five times as much as a Standard one. See Keyword tier.
Automatic tiers
You don't have to set tiers yourself. For every search, the Explorer suggests a tier for each keyword:
- Search demand. Keywords are compared with the biggest keyword in your search. The biggest become Core, strong supporting terms Important, the long tail Standard, and very small terms Minor.
- Relevance. If a keyword's results show few of the products that rank across the rest of your search, it becomes Minor. It is most likely about something else, such as an accessory.
- No data. When there is no reliable demand signal for a keyword, it stays Standard.
Because the tiers are relative to your search, adding a much bigger keyword can move the others down a tier. That is intended: the weights describe this search.
Changing a tier
Click the multiplier on a keyword chip and pick a tier. The suggestion is marked with a sparkle; picking it again returns to the automatic tier. Select by weight switches all keywords of a tier on or off at once, for example to look at your Core keywords alone.
In the Explorer, changed tiers belong to that search and are part of the page address, so a shared link shows the same weights. Save as market keeps them. In a market, a change saves itself.
What the weights affect
Average position, visibility, volatility and the JustRanks Score are weighted. Coverage and Top 10 count every keyword the same.
Weights never change what gets captured. Every keyword is captured on the same schedule, whatever its tier.
When to set them
Ideally before you start reading charts. The averages are computed from the captures each time you look, so a changed tier re-weights the whole period, not just the days from now on. A chart you have been watching can shift under you, not because the market moved but because you re-weighted it. That is legitimate, but it is easier to reason about if you do it deliberately rather than in the middle of investigating a drop.
A caution
Weighting is a way of describing your business, not of improving your numbers. Marking everything you rank well on as Core and everything else as Minor produces a flattering score that tells you nothing. The useful setting is the one you would defend to someone who knows your category.