Keyword strategy best practices covers the principles. This article walks through applying them, because the gap between understanding the trade-off and choosing your first twenty keywords is where most teams get stuck.
Keyword setup is the step that most affects whether Salesmotion feels useful in week one. It is also the step most teams rush. Budget an hour, and expect to revise it twice.
The method in short
- Start with 5 to 10 accounts, not your whole list
- Write keywords for what triggers a deal, not what you sell
- Set priorities deliberately, since they affect scoring
- Read a week of output and cut what produced nothing useful
- Repeat once, then expand to the full account list
The iteration is not optional. A keyword set that has never been revised is a keyword set nobody has read the output of.
Step 1: Start small
Configure keywords against a handful of representative accounts rather than your entire territory. A narrow test set gives you a readable volume of signals within a few days, which is what you need in order to judge whether the keywords are right.
Starting with eight hundred accounts and forty keywords produces a feed nobody can evaluate. You cannot tell whether a keyword is wrong or simply quiet, so you end up keeping everything.
Pick accounts you know well. You will be judging whether surfaced signals are genuinely relevant, and that judgement is easier on companies whose situation you already understand.
Step 2: Write for the trigger, not the product
This is the most common mistake, and it is worth being blunt about.
Teams instinctively write keywords describing what they sell. If you sell data infrastructure, you write "data infrastructure." The problem is that your prospects rarely announce that they are buying data infrastructure. They announce the thing that creates the need.
Write keywords for the event that makes someone need you.
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| Your product category | The business change that creates the need |
| "sales training" | "sales team expansion", "new CRO", "quota increase" |
| "compliance software" | "regulatory audit", "new market entry", "certification" |
| "clinical trial services" | "phase 2 initiation", "trial expansion", "site activation" |
The test: would a company issue a press release containing this phrase? Companies announce funding rounds, leadership hires, facility openings, product launches, and regulatory milestones. They do not announce that they are evaluating vendors in your category.
Step 3: Keep phrases short
Keyword matching looks for the phrase as written. Long descriptive phrases match almost nothing, because real announcements are not phrased the way an internal strategy document is.
"Companies expanding their clinical operations team in Europe" will not match. "Clinical operations" will. So will "site expansion." Let the account context and the signal itself supply the rest of the meaning.
If you find yourself writing a keyword longer than four words, it is a description rather than a keyword. Break it into the two or three short phrases actually likely to appear in text.
Related terms group automatically, so you do not need to enumerate every variation. Add the distinct concept, not five conjugations of it.
Step 4: Set priorities deliberately
Each keyword carries a priority of high, medium, or low, and this feeds the account score. See Understanding the Salesmotion score for how scoring works overall.
The useful discipline is to reserve high priority for keywords that would make you drop what you are doing.
- High: a direct buying trigger. If this appears, someone should look at the account this week.
- Medium: relevant context worth knowing before a call, but not urgent on its own.
- Low: background. Useful in aggregate, not individually actionable.
If everything is high priority, nothing is, and the score loses its ability to rank. A rough starting distribution is three or four high, eight to ten medium, and the rest low.
Step 5: Read a week of output, then cut
After a week, review what each keyword actually produced. Sort every keyword into three categories.
Producing useful signals. Keep, and consider raising priority if it is consistently strong.
Producing volume that nobody acts on. This is the noise category, and it is usually one or two keywords generating most of the problem. A term too generic for your industry will match constantly. Either narrow it or remove it. Removing a noisy keyword improves the feed more than adding three good ones.
Producing nothing. Two different causes, and they need opposite fixes. Either the phrase is too long or too specific to match real text (rewrite it shorter), or the event genuinely is not happening at your accounts (leave it, it may fire later, and a quiet high-value keyword costs nothing).
The distinction matters. Teams often delete quiet keywords that were correctly written for rare, high-value events, which is exactly the wrong call.
Step 6: Expand
Once the set produces signals you would act on for your test accounts, apply it to the full account list. Expect a second round of tuning at scale, since terms that were quiet across eight accounts may be noisy across eight hundred.
Different teams need different keyword sets
If you have teams selling different things, they need different keywords. A software team and a services team at the same company are triggered by different events, and a merged keyword set serves neither well. One team ends up receiving signals aimed at the other, concludes the tool is generic, and stops opening it.
Where teams have distinct motions, configure their keywords separately and scope alerts to the right group. If you are unsure how to structure this for your organization, contact support@salesmotion.io and we will help map it out.
Common problems
The feed is overwhelming
Almost always one or two overly generic keywords. Find the highest-volume terms, and cut or narrow them before touching anything else.
The feed is nearly empty
Usually keywords written as long descriptive phrases. Shorten them to two or three words. Also confirm your accounts are the kind of companies that generate public announcements at all, since a very small private company may simply produce little public material.
Signals are relevant but not useful
The keywords match, but the matches do not tell you to act. This usually means keywords describe your category rather than a trigger. Revisit step 2.
Everything looks equally important
Priorities are probably all set high. Redistribute so that high priority is genuinely rare.