How to pick the right keywords

Sourcee’s keyword matching engine is one of its most powerful features.

Selecting the right keywords means we can deliver instant notifications for requests that are relevant to you.

Getting you to the front of the queue when responding to journalists and giving you the best chance of securing that backlink.

Improving your keywords

Sourcee tracks the number of journo requests your keywords have matched in the last 3 months.

Use this data to make tweaks to your keywords. Below we go through a few suggestions to get the most your keywords depending on how well it is performing.

If a keyword is performing well

Add in word variants - If 'ecommerce' is getting traction, include 'ecom', 'e-com' and 'e-commerce'

Same goes for hashtags - Look out for hashtags that are related to your keyword, there may also be shortened to acronyms e.g. ‘cost of living crisis’ = 'colc'

Expand your topic scope - 'chatGPT' getting lots of hits? Can you provide insight about: 'GPT3', 'AI', 'stable diffusion', 'bard', 'openAI'?

Don’t forget plurals! - 'Mortgage Adviser' will NOT match 'Mortgage Advisers', so remember to add in any relevant plurals.

If a keyword isn’t getting many matches

There may be too many words - While you can add multiple words as a single ‘key phrase’ this will severely limit the number of matches as both keywords need to be matched in the exact order.

Not a popular topic - your keyword is linked to a topic that just isn’t something that is commonly written about

Struggling to get any keyword matches at all?

Use single keywords - At least to start with; you can always add in extra keywords to create a key phrase if you get too many irrelevant requests.

Become a generalist - It might just be that your specific market or niche isn’t talked about much, take for example, a seller of vintage beanie babies 🐻 on Etsy.

It looks like it could be tricky to find relevant requests for this person right? But let’s zoom out a bit.

They sell products online, so they should know about ‘ecommerce’, ‘SEO’, ‘digital marketing’, ‘social media’ etc. very popular keywords.

What occasion are these items perfect for? ‘Mother’s day’, ‘Valentines day’, ‘Christmas’. etc There are always gift roundup requests.

Add in where you live - Journalists sometimes look for comment from people within a locality so it’s worth adding related keywords.

Get personal - Similar to above, your particular relationship status, dietary preferences (vegan), number of children, religion etc may be asked for in requests.

Refresh your keywords - Don’t let them stagnate, as the news cycle evolves and your expertise develops, add in these newly relevant keywords.

If you are still struggling to find keywords that have a good number of matches, send me a DM on Twitter.