Weak spots are positions in Google’s top 10 results that are held by pages your site has a real chance of outranking with good, well-optimised content alone - no additional backlinks needed. The more weak spots a keyword or page has, the more realistic it is that new content from you takes one of those positions.
It is one of the metrics unique to RankDots, and it answers a different question from difficulty. Difficulty scores how strong the ranking pages are on average; Weak spots counts how many of them are individually beatable. A results page can look difficult on average and still contain two or three weak positions - and two or three is all a new page needs.
Where you see it
On the Pages screen, the Weak spots column shows how many weak spots were found across a page’s keywords. A page can show more weak spots than it has keywords: each keyword’s results are checked separately, and one keyword can hold several weak positions.
Weak spots is also available as a filter and in Manage columns, and it feeds two things you meet elsewhere: the Easy-to-rank search volume column, which adds up the demand sitting behind winnable keywords, and the prioritisation that ordered your plan when the project was created.
What counts as weak
A result is counted as weak relative to you, not in the abstract. A page in the results is weak when your own page or domain has a real chance of outranking it through content quality alone - because your existing link profile is already on a par with, or stronger than, theirs. Nothing about the page itself has to be bad; what matters is that beating it does not require you to build anything beyond better content.
Because weakness is relative, it is not a quality judgement about the competitor. The same set of results could look weak to one of the web’s most authoritative domains and strong to a brand-new site with little trust - so the same keyword can show different Weak spots for different sites. The count you see is about your chances, from where your site stands today.
One rule is absolute: a handful of very large, high-authority domains are automatically excluded from ever being counted as weak. Their domain authority makes them effectively unbeatable through content alone, whoever you are. What is a weak page? [link is coming] covers the assessment in more detail.
If your project was created from a keyword, RankDots does not yet know your site - so weak spots are assessed using approximate values for a young, recently published website. That is a deliberately cautious baseline. Once you connect Google Search Console, the assessment switches to your domain’s real data, and the counts reflect where your site actually stands - so expect them to change when the connection is made.
How to read the number
A high count is a green light for content. Many weak spots means the current results have room in them for you: several positions are held by pages your site could displace with better content. These are the pages to build first - you are competing against the weakest occupants, not the strongest.
A low count is not a red light - it is a different job. Few or no weak spots means the top results are firmly held. Content alone is unlikely to break in; ranking there is a longer project of authority, links, and time. When you are choosing what to create next, prefer the page with weak spots and come back to the fortress later.
Read it next to demand. Weak spots tells you how open the door is; search volume tells you how many people are behind it. A page with modest demand and many weak spots is often a better first move than the biggest page in the plan with none. The Google top 20 [link is coming] column shows you exactly who holds the results you would be contesting.
Weak spots is an assessment of today’s results page, not a promise. Results change, and outranking a weak page still requires genuinely better content - the metric finds the openings; the content has to walk through them.
What next
- What is a weak page? [link is coming]
- Weak spots vs difficulty: which to trust when they disagree [link is coming]