Getting Started With Search

A site is an Answer Radar project

Search does not keep its own list of sites. A site in Search is the same project that Answer Radar uses, with the same domain, brand name and competitors. Add it once and both products can use it. If you already have an Answer Radar project, it is already a site here.

The Search page shows one site at a time. When you have more than one, a site picker beside the heading switches between them, and it keeps the tab you are on. The address holds the site and the tab, so a link to a tab can be copied and shared with a teammate who has access.

Adding a site

With no sites yet, the page says Add your site to start. Press Add site, or the Add site button beside the picker, to open /search/new. The form asks for a Domain, which is required, an optional Brand name, and a list of Competitors. Each competitor has a name and an optional domain. It also has optional fields for Buyer segment, Category, Geography and Language, which Answer Radar uses.

Press Create project. You land on the Rankings tab of the new site. Search uses the domain to find your pages in Google's results, and counts any subdomain of it as yours.

Connecting Search Console

On a site with no tracked keywords and no Search Console connection, the Rankings tab asks you to connect Search Console first. You add Linkeddit's address as a user on your property in Google, then press Check for properties and pick one. The steps are in the connecting Search Console guide.

Only properties on this site's own domain are offered, and a property that another account has already connected is refused. Disconnecting is available in the same panel.

Search Console is what lets you add your top queries in one click, and it feeds the Watchlist's before and after numbers.

Choosing and limiting keywords

Open Manage keywords on the Rankings tab. You can type keywords, one per line or separated by commas, upload a file, or press Add top Search Console queries. That last button takes your queries with the most impressions and leaves out queries that contain your brand terms, such as your brand name or domain name, because ranking first for your own name is not useful to track.

By default one site can track up to 50 keywords. When you go over, the drawer says how many did not fit under the limit. Removing a keyword switches it off and frees a slot, and its history is kept. Typing it again turns it back on. The Search Console button never turns a removed keyword back on.

Each tracked keyword is checked on Google weekly. Checks draw on a monthly allowance, which defaults to 500 checks per account. A keyword already checked in the last 7 days is answered from a shared store at no cost.

What happens next

Setting up is free. On a site with no checks yet, the next hourly run queues the first check, and the tab reads First check pending until it lands. After that the whole site is checked again once its newest result is a week old. Keywords you add to a site that was checked recently are picked up at that next weekly check, and until then their row reads Not checked yet.

The other tabs build on the same site: Topics, Map and Competitors for keyword research, and Watchlist for pages you changed. Each tab keeps working if another one fails to load.

FAQ