Keyword tiers and weights
Four tiers decide how heavily each keyword counts in your averages. Setting them turns a flat average into one that reflects what your business actually cares about.
By default every keyword counts 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, shown as a coloured dot beside it in the keyword views:
- Core — the terms your product lives on
- Important — meaningful, not decisive
- Standard — the default
- Minor — tracked for awareness, not for the average
Each tier carries a multiplier, shown as a small chip next to the keyword. A Core keyword moves your averages several times as much as a Standard one; a Minor keyword barely moves them at all. See Keyword tier for the exact multipliers.
Core keywords can be fine-tuned further, up or down from their tier weight, when two Core terms are not equally core. That adjustment is the second number on the chip.
What the weights affect
Everything that averages across keywords: average position, visibility, the JustRanks Score, coverage-weighted comparisons, and the ranking that decides which competitors get tracked in detail.
They do not affect what gets captured. Every tracked keyword is captured every day regardless of tier — the weight changes how it counts, not whether it is measured.
When to set them
Ideally when you create the market, before you have read any charts. Changing a tier later recalculates the affected scores, which means 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.
The recalculation runs in the background and takes a moment to appear.
A caution
Weighting is a way of describing your business, not of improving your numbers. Marking everything you rank well for 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.