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

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One of the ways Wordtracker distinguishes itself from other keyword tools is the number of keywords a search returns - up to 1,000 per search in the Bronze plan, more in the Silver and Gold - making it really useful for the long tail.

A new feature on the Wordtracker's Keyword Tool now allows you to hone in on relevant keywords by excluding ‘negative keywords’ from your search.

How does it work?

When you make a search, negative words or phrases can be added to the search box. For example, you might sell mountain bikes and so first do a search for mountain bike.

You would enter:

mountain bike search

The 1,000 keywords in the returned report includes keywords containing trek (a brand you don’t sell) and review (which you don’t offer).

So you can repeat your search with those keywords added as negative keywords, like this:

negative terms

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

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

For example, let's say your new report showed irrelevant keywords containing magazine, rentals and electric. You'd add those as negatives, giving this seed list:

mountain bike
-trek
-review
-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.

plurals

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:

rio
-2016 olympics

If you searched for this as a broad search, you would get back everything with rio in the keyphrase, but without 2016 AND olympics BUT in any order. Eg, it would remove:

2016 rio olympics
rio 2016 olympics
olympics in rio 2016

If you searched for this as a phrase search, you would get back everything with rio but without the phrase 2016 olympics. It would return:

2016 rio olympics
olympics in rio 2016

and remove:

rio 2016 olympics

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