Keyword discovery

Every article RankYak writes starts with a keyword, so keyword research is the first thing that runs when you create a project, and it continues for as long as the project is active. This page explains where your keywords come from, how they are organized into topics, and how the pool keeps growing without any manual research.

How discovery works

When you create a project, RankYak analyzes your website to understand what you offer and who searches for it. From that understanding it identifies the topics your audience cares about, and then researches keywords within each topic. Every keyword is checked against live search data and stored with its search volume and difficulty, measured for your project's country and language, so a German project collects German keywords with German search volumes.

Discovered keywords land on the keyword overview, where you may review, star, or archive them. Of course, you may also add keywords of your own at any time.

Topic clusters

RankYak does not collect keywords as a flat list. Each keyword belongs to a topic, and each topic is a cluster of closely related keywords. Covering a cluster with articles that link to one another builds depth on that subject, which is how a site earns topical authority: search engines learn to associate your domain with the topic as a whole rather than with isolated pages. The topical map on the keywords page visualizes these clusters and shows how far your coverage has come.

Ongoing discovery

Discovery is not a one-time setup step. RankYak keeps working on your keyword pool in the background, and the pool expands automatically whenever more keywords are needed: new topics are researched and filled with fresh keywords. This keeps the content plan supplied with material month after month.

The loop continues until your project reaches its keyword target, the total number of keywords you would like covered. You may change the target in your project settings; a higher number produces broader coverage and more topics, while a lower number keeps the strategy focused on a tighter niche. Once the target is reached, RankYak stops broadening the pool and shifts its attention to refreshing the articles you already have.

Keywords you already rank for

If you have connected Google Search Console, every discovered keyword is checked against your site's actual search performance. When one of your existing pages already ranks for a keyword, RankYak marks the keyword as covered by that page instead of scheduling a new article for it, so your new content never competes with your old content.