Use negative keywords to find even more relevant keywords with Wordtracker's Keywords tool

Posted by Robert Wickert on 29 April 2010

A new feature on the Wordtracker Keywords Tool now allows you to find even more relevant keywords by excluding ‘negative keywords’ from broad and phrase match searches. Wordtracker developer, Rob Wickert, shows us how to use it.

One of the ways Wordtracker distinguishes itself from other keyword tools is the number of keywords a search returns – up to 1,000 (compared to Google’s 150). Wordtracker’s 1,000 keywords will now contain more relevant keywords. Here’s how it works …

How does it work?

When you make a search, negative words or phrases can be added to new lines. For example, you might sell mountain bikes and so first do a broad match search for mountain bike (including plurals) you would enter:

mountain bike

The 1,000 keywords in the returned report includes keywords containing trek (a brand you don’t sell and reviews which you don’t offer. So you can repeat your search with those keywords added as negative keywords, like this:

mountain bike
-trek
-reviews

See image:

Your report still returns 1,000 keywords but this incudes more relevant keywords because it excludes known irrelevant ones, ie, any containing trek or reviews.

You can, of course, further improve your results by adding any more negative words your new report reveals.

For example, my new report above showed irrelevant keywords containing magazine, rentals and electric. I’ll add those as negatives, giving this seed list:

mountain bike
-trek
-reviews
-magazine
-electric
-rental

Note that the search configuration being set to ‘plurals’ applies to negative keywords as well as positive. So adding -rental will exclude both mountain bike rental and mountain bike rentals.

Works for broad and phrase match searches

Negative keywords work for both broad (Keywords in any order) and phrase (Exact keyword inside a search term) searches.

But the negative phrases act just like other seed words in that if it's a broad search, the negative keywords can be in any order, and when in a phrase search, they have to be in the same order as typed. An example:

london
-2012 olympics

If you searched for this as a broad search, you would get back everything with london in the keyphrase, but without 2012 AND olympics BUT in any order. Eg, it would remove:

2012 london olympics
london 2012 olympics
olympics in london 2012

If you searched for this as a phrase search, you would get back everything with london but without the phrase 2012 olympics. It would return:

2012 london olympics
olympics in london 2012

and remove:

london 2012 olympics

If you have any questions, post a comment below.

Meanwhile, did you know that you can get a free 7-day trial of Wordtracker's Keywords tool?