DrumUp Keyword Set Optimization Guide

Your keywords determine the content that will be recommended to you. Choosing the right keywords will ensure that you get only relevant stories in your feed. Here are a few tips on choosing a good set of keywords for your DrumUp account:

DO’s:

  • Think of words/phrases that are likely to be present frequently in articles that you would like to share and add them as a comma separated list.
  • Keep the length of each key phrase from 1 to 3 words.
  • Add at least 4-5 comma separated keywords for best results
  • Use negative keywords to remove ambiguity from your main keywords. For example, to share content about “eagles” (birds), you would want to avoid ambiguity with stories about sports teams that contain the word “Eagles” in their name. This can be done by setting your negative keywords to “sports, team, football”.
  • If your niche is very specific, then add broader themed keywords along with the niche specific ones. For example, if your business sells Moroccan lighting, then ‘Moroccan lighting’ and ‘Moroccan lamps’ as specific key phrases are likely to yield very few or no stories. However, adding broader key phrases alongside like ‘home decor’, ‘interior decor’ may yield some relevant results.
  • Adding popular brand names related to your industry as keywords can generate relevant stories. For example, if you are an internet marketer, then ‘Google’, Facebook’, ‘Twitter’ as keywords can fetch stories about these brands, which are likely to be of interest to your audience. Similarly if you are a high-end fashion retailer, then including the brand names that you sell as keywords can fetch interesting stories about them.
  • Use exact keyword match for ambiguous keywords. Sometimes, a key-phrase can contain words which are generic in nature, yielding irrelevant results. For example, 'hearing loss' - both 'hearing' and 'loss' are generic words - this key-phrase is very likely to give some irrelevant results. In such cases, encapsulating the key-phrase in double quotes (""), like "hearing loss", will give results of stories which have the key-phrase present intact. Generally, it is not recommended to use the exact keyword match option, as it will filter out a lot of relevant stories too, leaving you with very few recommendations. But in some cases such as company or brand names or loose keywords, it might be useful. Do experiment and see where it makes sense.

DON’Ts:

  • Do not use location/destination names as standalone keywords, instead use them as a part of key phrases. If you are looking for some geo-specificity in your content suggestions, then pair the location/destination names with your niche specific words/phrases to form your keywords. For example, if you are looking for stories on cultural and musical events in Chicago, then rather than using a keyword set similar to ‘Chicago, music, dance, theatre’, use the paired version – ‘Chicago music, Chicago dance, Chicago theatre’. Using Chicago alone as a keyword can throw up irrelevant results, which may not be related to music, theatre or dance.
  • Do not use ambiguous or generic words as keywords. For example, if you are looking for stories on cyber security, then using ‘security’ as one of your keywords could result in irrelevant stories, as the word ‘security’ could be used in contexts other than in relation to cyber security. Instead, using ‘online privacy’, ‘internet security’ or similar keywords would yield relevant results.

With a little bit of experimentation with your keyword strings, you can easily optimize the performance of your feed. So, do not stop at your first set of keyword inputs – play around with your keywords to discover the best settings for your feed.