Using Negative Search Criteria

This article explains how negative keywords work and when they might be useful. Learn how to add negative keywords to Seamless.AI Search.

About Negative Keywords

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Negative keywords let you exclude search terms from your prospecting and help you focus on the firmographics that matter to your targeting. Better targeting can help improve the effectiveness of your list-building efforts and increase your return on investment (ROI).

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This article explains how negative keywords work and when they might be useful. You can then learn about how to Add negative keywords to Seamless Search.

How Negative Keywords Work

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One key to a highly targeted prospecting campaign is choosing who not to target.

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When selecting negative keywords for prospecting campaigns, look for titles, companies, and names that are similar to your ideal customer personas, but might include disqualified prospects. For example, let’s say you’re a SaaS salesperson who sells an email marketing platform. In this case, you may want to add negative words for companies like “Mailchimp” and “ActiveCampaign.”

Negative keywords won’t match to close variants or other expansions. For example, if you exclude "-Marketing Manager" from a search, our A.I. will remove "Marketing Manager" from the search. However, it will not remove "Marketing" and "Manager" as search criteria

Negative keywords will also filter from multiple different fields within our System.

For example: If any negatively added Keyword is found in our below fields, they will be removed from the contact data search results:

• Company Names
• Street
• City
• Postal Code
• Country
• Industries
• Description

Why are Negative Keywords Used?

Simply put, negative keywords are designed to keep our artificial intelligence search engine from delivering disqualified prospects in your search results.

As we showed in the example above, your competition probably doesn’t want to buy your email marketing solution.

Negative keywords are specifically designed to make it easier to drill down and reach your target audience, so you can  eliminate wasted man hours and streamline your prospecting process.

Types of Negative Keywords

Negative phrase match

For negative phrase match keywords, your results won't show if the search contains the exact keyword terms in the same order. The search may include additional words, but the results won't show as long as all the keyword terms are included in the search in the same order. The search may also include additional characters to a word, and the results will show, even when the rest of the keyword terms are included in the search in the same order.

Keep in Mind

Choose your negative keywords carefully. If you use too many negative keywords, your search results may contain few prospects.

Negative keywords do not match to close variants, so your results might still show prospects that contain close variations of your negative keyword terms.

How to Add Negative Keywords to Seamless Search

Please Remember: Your results may still occasionally contain prospects containing these terms.

1. Sign in to your Seamless.AI account
2. Navigate to Contact or Company search tab from the left side navigation menu
3. Add negative keywords by including a minus (-) before any input on a free-text field.

Ex: -sales on the Titles field, or -Nike on the Companies or Websites field as shown in the screenshot above

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