A monitoring keyword is a name you want to hear about. Not a topic you want to rank for: a word that, when somebody types it in public, you would like to know. Your brand is the obvious first one. The useful ones after that are less obvious.
What to listen for
- Your brand, written the way people write it rather than the way your logo does. If half your customers type it as two words, that is a second keyword.
- Your product names, if they are talked about separately from the company.
- Your rivals. Somebody asking for alternatives to a competitor is the single best conversation you can walk into, and they are never going to say your name in that post.
- The misspellings. Whatever autocorrect does to your name is what a real share of posts will use.
- Your founders, if they are the public face of the business.
What not to listen for: your industry. “Project management” is not a mention, it is a firehose, and it will spend your monthly allowance in a day on posts that have nothing to do with you.
Adding one
Open Monitoring → Keywords and press Add keyword. One word or phrase per keyword. Serpfeed starts checking for it straight away and brings back the recent past first, so a new keyword usually has something in the feed within a few minutes rather than tomorrow.
Discover keywords next to it suggests names to listen for based on what your project does, including rivals you may not have thought of. It needs your project description to be filled in, and you can add context of your own before it runs. Everything it suggests is a suggestion: you tick the ones you want.
The list shows when each keyword was last checked. “Never” on a keyword you added a moment ago is normal and resolves itself on the next pass.
How many you get
Monitoring keywords are limited per plan, because each one is a standing instruction to go and look. The Free plan tracks one, which is enough for your own brand; paid plans go up from there. The exact number for each plan is on the pricing page, under Monitoring.
They are counted separately from your linkbuilding keywords, and one does not eat into the other. Both are called “Keywords” in the app, and the section you are in is what tells them apart: the Keywords pillar is topics you want to rank for, and Monitoring → Keywords is names you want to hear about.
Sending a keyword here from research
If you are in Find keywords and spot a phrase worth hearing about rather than ranking for, the arrow next to Save has Watch for mentions on it. That creates a monitoring keyword without you having to retype it here, and it counts against your monitoring allowance rather than your linkbuilding one.
A keyword that brings back the wrong thing
Short brand names collide with ordinary words, and a two-letter product name will match everything. Three things fix most of it, and none of them means deleting the keyword:
- Excluded words. A mention containing one of them never appears in your feed. “Hiring” and “job” are the classic pair.
- Block an author or a domain that keeps producing noise.
- On Reddit, name the communities you want, or the ones you never want.
All three live in Settings, and are covered in Getting less noise.
If the keyword is a common word rather than a name, though, none of those is really the fix. A more specific phrase is: “Acme CRM” instead of “Acme” finds fewer posts and loses almost none of the ones you wanted.
Deleting a keyword keeps the mentions