One dialog, four decisions: what to analyse, which language, which country, and - optionally - a narrower location. This page explains what each field does, why the market choice matters, and what happens when you press Find topics. To begin, select Add new project at the top of the sidebar.
Your domain or a keyword
This field decides what RankDots analyses. Enter your website’s domain and your site becomes part of the data: RankDots reads your current pages, your live rankings and your competitors’ footprint before building recommendations. Enter a keyword instead - any phrase that describes your business - and the plan is built entirely from search demand, no website needed. If you have a live site, use the domain: it gives the analysis the most to work with.
Language and country
Choose the language your audience searches in and the country you want to rank in. This pair is not a preference - it is the scope of the entire project: every keyword is discovered, every search volume collected and every results page read for exactly this combination.
This choice is permanent. Once the project is created, the country and language cannot be changed - they appear greyed out in the project’s Settings, along with the seed you entered. Choose the market you target, not the one you browse from; and if you serve several countries or languages, create a project for each - a different market is a different project.
Advanced location options
For a local business, select Advanced location options and enter a state, region or city in the Specify your target location dialog, then Save. Search results are narrowed to that area, which matters when the searches you care about are local ones.
What happens when you press Find topics
- RankDots shows the Select matching categories dialog - whether you started from a domain or a keyword. Keep the groups that match your business, untick the rest; or switch on Not seeing what you’re looking for?, describe your topic in your own words, and select Find topics again.
- The analysis runs in the background: keywords discovered and checked, analysed, grouped into pages, clustered and prioritised. The screen shows placeholder cards and a progress notice; it is a short wait, and RankDots emails you when the project is built.
- The results appear all at once: a sorted plan on the Topic clusters screen. What happens during analysis [link is coming] covers the pipeline in detail.
Naming and tagging your project
The project is named after what you entered - your domain or your keyword. You can rename it any time in the project’s Settings, where the name is the one field that stays editable. Add tag, on the same screen, attaches labels to the project; tags appear next to project names in the project list, which keeps things findable once you run several projects - one per market, per client or per team. The rest of Settings - connecting Search Console, deleting the project - is covered in Project settings [link is coming].
What next
- Your plan is ready — what now? [link is coming]
- What happens during analysis [link is coming]