Keeping a keyword and putting one to work are two different acts, and only the second is limited. This article is about the second one: the small set of keywords Serpfeed actually hunts links against, why it is small, and how to choose what goes in it.
Two sets, one page
Your saved keywords are everything you are keeping. That set is generous, free, and there is no reason to be careful with it: save anything that looks interesting.
Inside it is a much smaller set, used for linkbuilding. Those are the keywords Serpfeed searches Google with, over and over, looking for the “best of” lists, the resource pages and the guest-post sites that could link to you. Each one is real searching on every discovery run, which is why it is the set your plan puts a number on: 3 on Free, rising with each plan. The exact numbers are on the pricing page as “Discovery keywords”.
Putting a keyword to work
From any keyword row, open the menu and choose Use for linkbuilding. The row picks up a Linkbuilding badge, and it starts counting.
The full set, with your plan’s number and how many slots are left, lives in Linkbuilding → Settings rather than on the keyword page. That split is deliberate: the keyword pages are for finding and organising, and settings is where you decide what runs.
Send more than fits and Serpfeed takes as many as it can and tells you exactly how many it could not, rather than refusing the lot.
Taking one out
Stop using for linkbuilding puts the keyword back in your saved set and frees the slot. It is not dismissed, and nothing is thrown away, so swapping one keyword for another costs you nothing.
Worth doing every month or so. The Opportunities column tells you which of your keywords are earning their slot, and a keyword with a good number beside it deserves to stay in while one showing a dash after several runs probably does not.
Order matters, and targets come first
Serpfeed works down your linkbuilding keywords in a set order: the ones you told us you want to be known for during setup, marked with a Target badge, and then the rest by monthly searches, highest first.
This is worth knowing on the smaller plans, where the list is short enough that its order is the whole story. On Free, three keywords is three, so pick the three that describe what you sell rather than three variations of one phrase.
Choosing well
- Pick the category, not the feature. The sites that write “best X tools” articles are writing about a category. A keyword naming your cleverest feature finds pages nobody links to.
- Spread them out. Three near-identical phrases return three near-identical sets of sites, which wastes two of your three slots.
- Volume is a tie-breaker, not the rule. A term with modest searches that exactly describes your category beats a huge generic one, because the pages ranking for the huge one are usually too big to answer an email.
- New site with no rankings? Use the keywords you want to rank for. They work from day one, and on a new site your own judgement is the best signal available.
Discovery itself is free