Most keyword lists fail one of two ways: they miss the threads that matter, or they bury you in junk. The fix is usually three or four words.
The two failure modes
Too narrow, and you only catch posts that name your product, which means you never find the people who do not know you exist yet. Too broad, and every post mentioning your category floods in, most of it irrelevant. A good keyword set lives in the middle: wide enough to catch intent, tight enough to stay readable.
Start from the buyer's words, not yours
You call it "social listening." Your buyer types "tool to track when people mention my brand." Write down how real people describe the problem out loud, in their words. Those phrases catch the early, unbranded posts, the ones competitors miss because they only watch for their own name.
Layer your keywords in three groups
- Problem phrases, how people describe the pain ("keep missing leads on reddit", "manually checking subreddits").
- Solution phrases, what they ask for ("monitoring tool", "alternative to …", "recommend a …").
- Competitor and category names, anyone weighing options or unhappy with a rival.
Together these cover the whole funnel: people who have the problem, people shopping for a fix, and people already comparing tools.
Use exclusions to kill the noise
If one word drags in junk, a brand name with a common meaning, a phrase that is mostly memes, exclude the contexts you do not want rather than dropping the keyword entirely. A couple of well-chosen exclusions usually do more for signal quality than ten more keywords.
Then let scoring do the last mile
You will never write keywords precise enough to catch only perfect leads, and you should not try. Cast a slightly wide net, then let relevance scoring rank what comes back, so the strong buyer signals rise to the top and the chatter sinks. Keywords decide what you see; scoring decides what you read first.
Set up a keyword set this way and revisit it after a week, drop what never matched, add the phrases you saw buyers actually use. Try it free.
← All posts