Fifty keywords is a lot to read every morning. Favorites and tags are the two ways Insights lets you cut that list down: star the handful that matter, and label the rest so you can slice them by topic, by page or by client.
Mark a keyword as favorite
Go to Insights, Rankings. The first column of the table is a star. Click it to add the keyword to your favorites, click it again to remove it.
Favorites are not just a visual marker. They drive two other features:
- the Favorite keywords widget on the Insights dashboard, which shows only those keywords and their latest movement;
- the Only your favorite keywords option of your email reports, under Insights, Settings, Alerts. Pick it and the daily email lists your favorites instead of your whole set.
Use them for the terms you would actually report to a client or a manager: your money pages, your brand, the two or three head terms your business depends on.
Tag your keywords
Still on the Rankings screen, the Tags column carries an Add tags… field on every row. Type a tag and confirm; a keyword can carry as many tags as you need.
Tags are free text, so pick a convention and stick to it. The ones that pay off in practice:
- by topic:
seo,hosting,pricing— to see which content cluster is progressing; - by target page:
homepage,blog,product-x— to know which page to work on next; - by intent stage:
top-funnel,bottom-funnel— to check you are not only ranking on terms that never convert; - by client or site, if you manage several projects and report separately on each.
Your tags and your favorites survive the next ranking update: you set them once, not every day.
Filter the table by tag
Tags are a filter on the rankings table. Open the filters at the top of the table, choose Tags, and select one or several. The table narrows to the matching keywords.
You can combine it with the Intent filter to answer questions like “how are my transactional keywords on the pricing page doing?”
The filter is remembered for your user account, so the view you leave is the view you find on your next visit. Exports follow the same rule: CSV, Excel and Copy give you the rows matching your current filters.
Compare two segments
This is where tags become more than a label. In the filter bar above the graph, open Compare to and choose vs segment.
Pick the Segment type — Tags or Intent — then a value for Segment A and a value for Segment B, and click Apply.
Insights then puts the two groups side by side: the table shows the position of each segment and a Change column with the gap between them. Useful for questions a single average cannot answer:
blogversusproduct: is your editorial content pulling more weight than your commercial pages?informationalversustransactional: are you visible where people buy, or only where they read?- a cluster you have been working on versus one you have not touched, to measure what the work actually produced.
Click Reset to go back to the default view.
Where to go next
- Track your keyword rankings in Google, for the rest of the filter bar and the other comparison modes.
- Receive your rankings by email, to send only your favorites.