Keywords
Keyword research, LogNorm's call on every keyword, Needs your call, targeting and rank tracking.
Keywords is where you decide which searches your site goes after. LogNorm gathers candidates from your Search Console, your competitors and keyword research, gives its own call on each one, and leaves the final decision to you: target it or skip it. Targeted keywords are tracked and drive your moves. Skipped ones never come back.
Open it from the sidebar under UnderstandKeywords. The page has three tabs: Discover, Topic clusters and Tracking. Keyword research is a plan feature; if your plan doesn't include it, the page shows an upgrade prompt instead.
The three tabs
| Tab | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Discover | Every keyword LogNorm has found, split into To review, Needs your call, Targeted and Skipped. This is where you make decisions. The badge counts suggestions waiting for you. |
| Topic clusters | Keywords grouped into hubs and spokes, one cluster per page you could write. See Topics and clusters. |
| Tracking | Positions over time for every targeted keyword, with 7- and 28-day movement, clicks and the page that ranks. |
Two buttons sit in the page header: Add keywords and Find keywords. You need the Owner, Admin, Editor or Analyst role to use them or to target and skip. Contributors and Viewers can read everything.
Your market
Every website has one market: the country (and, where a country has several, the language) its keyword data comes from. Search volumes, difficulty, rankings, keyword gaps and competitor discovery all use Google results in that country. The default is the United States in English, and a new website with a country domain (such as acme.de) starts on that country. LogNorm supports 94 countries, one market per website. To cover a second country, add it as a separate website.
The page header shows the current market, for example Market: Germany. Click it to change it in SettingsWebsites.
Changing the market
When you save a new market you choose between Save and refresh data, which re-runs keyword research, rank tracking and competitor analysis for the new country right away and uses credits like running them yourself (competitor analysis is charged per tracked competitor), and Save only, which costs nothing now. Until research runs again, the keywords you have keep the numbers from the previous market, and Keywords shows a banner with a Refresh for button so you can run it when you're ready.
Where suggestions come from
Each keyword carries small icons showing every place it was found. You can filter Discover by source.
| Source | What it means |
|---|---|
| Search Console | You already appear for it in Google. Queries with at least 10 impressions over the last 90 days, with clicks, average position and the page that ranks. |
| Competitors | A tracked competitor ranks for it in the top 30 and you don't, taken from their last analysis. See Competitors. |
| Research | Keyword ideas found from your seed topics. |
| Long-tail | More specific variations around the hub keywords of your biggest clusters, used to build spokes. |
| Ranking | A keyword your domain already ranks for in Google's top 30. |
| Added | Added by your team. |
Run keyword research
- Open Find keywords
Click Find keywords in the Keywords header. The dialog is titled Find more keywords.
- Add seed topics, or leave them empty
Type a seed and press Enter, up to 20. Leave the field empty and LogNorm picks 8-12 seed topics from your site analysis. Seeds from your last run appear as dashed chips you can click to reuse.
- Choose how many ideas to fetch
Pick 30, 60 or 100 keyword ideas per run. LogNorm also pulls up to 100 keywords you already rank for, your Search Console queries, competitor gaps and long-tail variations of your top cluster hubs.
- Start the run
The footer shows the maximum credits the run can use. Click Research from my site (or Research N seeds). You can close the dialog; progress shows at the top of the Keywords page, and new suggestions land in Discover.
A run checks volume and difficulty, screens every new suggestion for relevance, groups keywords into topic clusters and turns clusters into moves. Search data is cached for 30 days, so re-running the same seeds doesn't buy the data again.
LogNorm's call on each keyword
Every new keyword gets a read from LogNorm's decision model. It sees your business profile from the site analysis, your brand names, your tracked competitors and your active topics, and answers the same questions for every keyword. The answers appear as chips in the table and in full when you click a row.
| Call | Values | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | Core, Related, Tangential, Off-topic | Whether your buyers would search it. Core: buyers search it when looking for or comparing a product like yours. Related: your buyers' world. Tangential: shares your vocabulary, but searchers are rarely buyers. Off-topic: unrelated to what you sell. |
| Intent | Info, Commercial, Transactional, Navigational | What the searcher wants. When LogNorm is sure, its intent replaces the label from the keyword data provider. |
| Brand | Your brand, Competitor brand | Shown only when LogNorm is clear. A search for your own name, or for a tracked competitor's own brand. "X vs Y" and "X alternatives" searches never count as competitor brand; they're winnable. |
| Format | Article, Comparison, Alternatives, Integration, Use case, Product page, Glossary, Free tool | The kind of page that would best win the search. |
| Buying stage | Awareness, Consideration, Decision | The searcher's funnel stage. |
| Buyer fit | 0-100% | How likely someone matching your ideal customer searches it while evaluating a solution like yours. |
Each chip carries a confidence. A dashed chip means LogNorm isn't sure; hover it to see what it weighed, including the runner-up answer when there is a close one. LogNorm also files an unclustered keyword into one of your topics when it's confident about the fit.
What LogNorm does on its own
- Skips a suggestion only on a confident call: clearly off-topic, or a search for a competitor's own brand. The reason shows under the keyword in the Skipped list ("Skipped by LogNorm: …") so you can restore anything it got wrong.
- Never skips a keyword you targeted, and never changes a decision a person made.
- Asks you when it can't settle the keep-or-drop question. Those keywords go to Needs your call.
Needs your call
The Needs your call tab (marked with a hand icon) holds suggestions LogNorm couldn't settle. A keyword lands here when the chance it's worth keeping is close to a coin flip, when LogNorm can't place it on the relevance scale, or when it can't tell the intent. They're still suggestions, so they also appear under To review.
Hover the dashed chips, open the keyword for the full read, then target or skip it. Your decision clears the flag.
Target versus skip
| Decision | What happens |
|---|---|
| Target | The keyword moves to Targeted, starts rank tracking and raises the confidence of moves built on it and its cluster. Targeted keywords count against your plan's tracked-keyword limit; the Targeted tab shows how many you've used. |
| Skip | The keyword is never suggested or used again. Moves nobody has touched that rest on it are dismissed, and LogNorm tells you how many. Skipped keywords stay out of topic clusters. |
| Restore / Undo target | Sends the keyword back to To review. On the Targeted tab the bulk action reads Back to review. |
Decide one keyword with the Target and Skip buttons on its row, or tick several and use the bar that appears above the table. The same bar can add the selection to a cluster, or create a New cluster from selection: the keyword with the most searches becomes the hub.
The keyword score
The Score column is a 0-100 opportunity score, and Discover sorts by it by default. It weighs:
- Volume: up to 40 points, on a log scale.
- Ease: up to 30 points, the lower the difficulty the better.
- Intent: commercial and transactional score highest, informational a little less.
- Evidence: Search Console impressions and competitors ranking for it add points.
- Your position: ranking 4-20 adds the most; already top 3 takes points away, since there's less left to win.
- LogNorm's call: Core relevance adds points and Tangential removes them; buyer fit moves the score a few points either way; decision and consideration stages add a little. A keyword marked off-topic loses most of its score.
Open a keyword
Click any row to open its detail sheet. It shows:
- Searches per month, difficulty, your position and the opportunity score.
- LogNorm's read: every chip, buyer fit and buying stage, and a Re-check button.
- Why we suggest it: plain-language reasons, such as a competitor's ranking page or your Search Console numbers, with links.
- Competitors ranking for it, Search Console figures for the last 90 days and a 12-month demand trend when available.
- Its cluster, with a picker to move it to another one.
The footer has Target, Skip and Restore, Google results to see the live results page, and Create move to turn the keyword into a move straight away.
Re-check with LogNorm
LogNorm's calls are cached for 30 days. If your positioning, competitors or topics changed, ask for a fresh read:
- Re-check with LogNorm above the Discover table re-checks every keyword that isn't skipped, as a background job.
- Re-check in the selection bar checks just the selected keywords. Up to 100 are checked on the spot; larger selections run in the background.
- Re-check inside a keyword's sheet checks that one.
A re-check reports how many keywords it checked, how many need your call and how many it skipped as off-topic. Your own decisions are never overwritten.
Add keywords by hand
- Click Add keywords
The dialog is titled Target keywords.
- Paste your list
One per line or comma-separated, up to 50 at a time. The footer shows the estimated credits.
- Review LogNorm's read
Manual adds are targeted and tracked straight away, so they count against your plan's limit. LogNorm looks up volume, difficulty, CPC and intent, then shows its read on each one and flags any that look off for what you sell.
Rank tracking
The Tracking tab follows every targeted keyword from two sources:
- Search Console, daily. For targeted keywords that exactly match a query you get impressions for: position, clicks, impressions and the page that earned them, with 90 days of history. Requires Google Search Console.
- A weekly Google check. Your top-100 position for every targeted keyword, including ones where you don't appear yet. It runs automatically when the last check is 7 or more days old. Click Check rankings now to run it immediately.
The table shows position, change over 7 and 28 days, a 90-day position line, clicks and impressions over 28 days, monthly searches and the ranking page. The weekly check and monthly searches use your website's market. Filter with Moved up, Dropped, Striking distance, Top 10 and Not ranking. An overview above the table summarises keywords on page one, striking distance, estimated organic clicks and your biggest topic gaps.