Search terms also known as search queries are the words or phrases that you enter into search engines. Those search terms often contain words or phrases (keywords) that search marketers bid for ranking in the organic search results.
Search engines such as Google or Bing interprets the search terms provided by the users and provides the most relevant results.
For example, if users are searching for " Cat" this means they want to find more information about cat. But if they search phrase like " How to rank higher on Google", this means users are looking for step wise guide on how to rank higher on Google.
Search term Vs Keyword
If you know basic SEO, you may start thinking " Is search term same as Keyword?". You can find most of the people considering the same but it is a bit different.
The basic difference is, Search term is any word or phrase that user enters in search engine like Google while Keyword is word or phrase that search engines have in their index.
Search engines like Google extract the keywords associated with search terms during the crawling and indexing phase. In this way, it gets stored in their index.
Search queries are broken into a number of keywords and searched into their index to find the matching pages during the ranking process.
There might be the case when Keyword and search term is a perfect match but search engines will try to figure out the user's relevant query with the help of machine learning and display results accordingly.
Google's sophisticated ranking algorithm is capable to provide the best possible results to the users in both of the above-mentioned cases.
Where can I find search terms?
About 6 billion queries are served by Google every day. The interesting part is 15% of those queries are new. This means 15% of the search terms input by the users have never been used before.
There are various tools that can help you find out the search terms to optimize your organic as well as the paid campaign.
Google itself provides you with the instant suggestion when you start typing something. This is what other people have been searching related to that particular term.
The easiest way to find out those search terms is to see on the " People Also Ask" section and " Related Searches" section in Google's search results.
Some other tools offered by Google are Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner.
Google trend allows you to find the related search terms for the phrase or word you enter. It also provides information on trending searches as well as searches by years, country and topics.
Google Keyword Planner helps to find out the related keywords for the search term you enter. It provides search volume per month, keyword competition and much other useful information.
Importance of Search Terms in search engine marketing.
Search Terms and Keywords are two important factors in search engine marketing. You will be able to adjust your campaign for user's satisfaction by knowing what users type in the search engine.
For every search queries, you will find two categories of results- Paid results (Google Ads) and organic results.
Organic results are shown below the paid Ads and there are hundreds of Ads and other web pages competing for the top position.
Search Engine Advertising
Google shows relevant Ads according to search terms that users enter in the search box. So, you as an advertiser should perform keyword research to find out the search terms related to your products and services.
You can now bid for particular search term using Google Ads once you've created your ads including target search terms.
All the ads that you see on the Google search are managed by Google Ads which is the advertising platform of Google.
Google implements a sophisticated algorithm for deciding which ads to show based on various factors like location, device, bid and many other factors.
SEO (Search engine optimization)
You can optimize your content as well as your website for specific search terms with SEO. If your content is well optimized, it will appear on the first page of organic search results for a particular search term entered in Google.
While displaying search results, first Google will break the search query into a number of keywords and look into their index to find the best results for user's satisfaction.
The secret of search engine ranking is the relevancy of the content with the search query. You should include those searched terms in several places like title, heading and body. This overall process is called on-page SEO.
Conclusion
From the above article, it is clear that search term or query is something that users input in the search engine's search box. It is then associated with keywords available in their index. Knowing users search helps you greatly in conducting keyword research. You can greatly improve your on-page SEO for ranking higher on Google knowing search terms and keywords associated with it.
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