What do kept, dropped and unverified mean?

Every keyword the research finds ends up in one of three states, and the reason is shown under the keyword. The Keywords tab opens on Kept; the chips show the others.

Kept

Someone typing it could plausibly become a customer of the business described in the profile, and it has measured search volume. Kept keywords go on to grouping and, if their group is inspected, to a decision.

The grouping reads the 300 kept phrases with the most searches, your seed topics first. A kept phrase beyond that shows as Kept, not grouped: it passed the fit check but has no page in this plan. Tick any of them on the Keywords tab and press Check Ticked Keywords to run them on their own, with their own groups, verdicts and page decisions, at 5 credits a keyword. The same tick box sits on phrases set aside unjudged because more were found than the check reads.

Dropped

The keyword was set aside. The reasons:

• Not a customer search. It is about something the business does not sell, comes from the other side of the trade (someone buying a house when you buy houses), or is about jobs, salaries, free downloads or another site's brand. The row says which.
• Set aside unjudged. The research found more phrases than the check reads, so the rest were set aside without a judgment. They are listed so nothing is hidden, but nobody said they are wrong for you.
• It contains one of your brand terms, so you already rank for it by name.
• It contains one of your excluded terms.

Dropped keywords stay in the table with their reason, so you can see what was considered and add a term to the profile if something was dropped wrongly.

Not judged

Questions people also ask and related searches that Google showed for an inspected group. They are found after the check runs, so they are not judged and not part of the plan. They are there as ideas for the page.

Unverified

Unverified is a flag on a keyword, not a state. The phrase came from a real customer discussion, quoted verbatim, but the keyword databases have no recorded volume for it. That does not mean nobody searches it; long, specific phrases often fall below the databases' threshold. It stays in the table, flagged, and is never inflated into a number it does not have. If several unverified phrases point at the same need, that need is real demand the databases cannot see.