Keyword research

A keyword is the phrase someone types into Google before they land on your store. Rankira writes one article per keyword, so the keywords on your calendar decide what gets written for the next few weeks.

You never have to research them yourself. With Automatic Keyword Generation on — the default — Rankira keeps 25 to 30 keywords queued and tops them up as articles get written. Still, it’s worth understanding what it picks and why: a quick review beats a month of articles about the wrong thing.

Where keywords come from

Rankira pulls from four sources and combines them:

Your store

Your products, collections, and pages, plus the business description you wrote during setup. This is what keeps articles relevant to what you actually sell.

Your competitors

The stores you listed in Settings › Target Audience & Competitors. Rankira looks at what they rank for and finds gaps you could take.

Your target audiences

Each audience produces different phrasing for the same product — a “first-time buyer” and a “professional” search very differently.

Google Search Consoleoptional but recommended

Real queries your store already shows up for. Terms where you rank on page two are the fastest wins available to you, and Rankira prioritises them.

Reading the scores

Every keyword arrives with two numbers, shown on its chip in the calendar:

• Search volume — roughly how many people search that phrase per month. Higher means more potential traffic.
• Difficulty — how hard it would be to reach page one. Lower means an easier win.

The instinct is to chase the biggest volume. Resist it. A newer store ranks far faster for specific, lower-difficulty phrases, and ten articles ranking on page one beat one article on page nine.

Generating keywords

Your calendar fills itself, so this is for when you want a batch on your own terms — a particular competitor, a particular audience. Open Content Scheduler and click Generate keywords.

1. Choose what to base them on

   Three options: Competitors & target audiences (the default, and the best-rounded), Competitors alone, or Target audiences alone.

   Narrowing to one source is useful when you want a specific angle — audiences-only tends to produce more question-shaped, how-to keywords.

2. Pick which competitors or audiences to use

   Tick only the ones you want this batch built around. Leaving them all ticked gives you the widest spread of topics.

3. Set how many you want

   The maximum is limited by the free days left on your calendar — one keyword per day, so if you have twelve open days ahead you can generate up to twelve keywords.

4. Generate

   Research runs in the background and takes a few minutes. You can leave the screen; the keywords appear on the calendar when they’re ready, spread across your active weekdays.

Adding your own keywords

If you already know what you want an article about, click Add keywords and type it in. Manually added keywords skip the research step and go straight onto the calendar.

Worth doing when:

• You’re launching a product and want content ready for it.
• Customers keep asking the same question and you want an article to point them at.
• You’re covering a season or event with a fixed date.

Reviewing what you got

Skim the calendar after each batch. You’re looking for keywords that don’t belong — a phrase about a product category you don’t carry, or a topic that would attract readers who’d never buy from you.

Delete anything that doesn’t fit (open the chip’s menu and choose Delete), and drag the strongest keywords to earlier dates so they get written first. Full details in Content calendar.

Connecting Google Search Console

Search Console is Google’s free tool showing which searches already bring people to your store. Connecting it does two things: sharpens keyword research, and fills the performance charts on the Home screen with real clicks, impressions, and rankings.

1. Open the connection screen

   Go to Settings › Google Search Console and click Connect. A Google sign-in window opens.

2. Approve read access

   Sign in with the Google account that owns your Search Console property and approve the request. Rankira only reads your search performance data — it can’t change anything in your Google account.

3. Choose your property

   Pick the property matching your live store domain and save. If your store is at yourstore.com, choose that — not the .myshopify.com address.

You can disconnect at any time from the same screen. Keyword research keeps working without it — it just loses one of its four sources.