Working through the worklist

The worklist is the ranked list of keywords worth acting on, and it is built to be worked through over weeks rather than read once. Each row sits in a bucket — open, done, or not worth it — and the bucket is yours.

A new run refreshes the numbers and keeps your marks

A row is keyed by the project, the kind of opportunity and the keyword, not by the run that produced it. So running the analysis again updates the figures underneath rows you have already sorted rather than replacing the list, and nothing you marked is lost. One keyword can hold two rows — a gap and an outranked row are different findings about the same phrase.

Generation never deletes, either, and that is deliberate: it cannot tell “you now rank for that keyword” apart from “the step that would have reported it never ran”, since a run that failed partway still wrote what it had. A stale row naming an older run is visible and explainable; a worklist quietly emptied is neither.

The kinds of row

• Gap: a rival ranks for it and you do not.
• Outranked: you both rank and they are ahead.
• Improve: a query Search Console says you are shown for and earn little from.
• Write: a longer phrase found by expanding the keywords you already rank for. Its stored name is the long tail, and the screen calls it Write because that is what the row is asking you to do.

Acting on several rows at once

Tick the rows and the bar at the foot of the table offers every bucket but the one you are standing in — pressing your own bucket is a request that changes nothing — plus tracking the selection and adding it to a keyword list. It works with no scripting at all: the count is drawn by the page itself and the selection is submitted by the form the checkboxes belong to.

A row opens a brief beside the table: what the keyword is, who ranks for it now, the cluster of phrases around it, and what a page would have to cover. The same brief is a page of its own, so a link to it is a link to one thing rather than to a screen state.

Refreshing it costs nothing

Rebuilding the worklist re-derives it from rows the workspace has already paid for, so it is never refused and never spends. It reads only a finished run in the project’s current market, and with none it writes nothing and tells you to run an analysis in that market first.