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Special & hidden characters in keywords

What are special and hidden characters in my keyword list?

Georgia Shepherd avatar
Written by Georgia Shepherd
Updated over a year ago

In this article, learn what hidden & special characters mean and how to avoid these keywords in your analysis.

1) Hidden characters

When you import keywords (via copy-paste, CSV imports, etc.), invisible characters can attach themselves to your keywords. These hidden characters are not visible in AppTweak or text editors but can be detected in code.

To help you identify these, AppTweak now tags keywords with hidden characters in your keyword table:

The second "pinterest", with volume 82, does not contain a hidden character

👉 To avoid hidden characters, try manually typing affected keywords into your table:

2) Special characters

Special characters are more obvious to spot than hidden characters. When you add keywords to your list, you might have introduced special characters, such as punctuation marks ("!", ".", etc.) or other unique symbols ("•", "§", etc.).

If possible, remove special characters from your keyword analysis. If it is not possible (i.e. if your brand keywords include special characters), continue to monitor Search Popularity Scores.

Recommendations

  1. Monitor affected keywords.

  2. Replace keywords with their "clean" versions:

    1. Re-add them to the keyword table.

    2. Remove invisible characters.

    3. Remove special characters.

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