SEO
What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords?
![What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords? What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords?](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1655731998_What-Is-The-Difference-Between-Search-Queries-And-Keywords.png)
Marketers use the terms search query and keyword interchangeably with no ill intention, but how the two terms differ needs to be clarified.
Because not knowing the difference between a query and a keyword can lead to poor-performing search marketing strategies.
This article will examine the key aspects of both search queries and keywords, starting with the definition.
What Are Search Queries?
Search queries are what people search.
When you ask Siri something (a query) or type stuff (a query) in Google and hit “search” – that is known as a search query.
The term search query only refers to the literal text used to initiate a search.
What information a user is looking to retrieve is known as the search intent.
You can read about the different types of search intent in the Search Engine Journal article, How People Search: Understanding User Intent.
What Are Keywords?
Keywords, on the other hand, are the foundation of search campaigns.
They are the words or phrases you build a paid search or organic marketing campaign on.
Keywords are the exact term or phrases that you want your website to show up on Google.
The Difference
The difference between keywords and search queries has to do with whether or not you’re talking about a user’s action or the action of a marketer.
Users don’t know about keywords and don’t care about keywords. They just want an answer to their query.
Marketers? Well, you and I care a lot about search queries.
Understanding what our audience is typing into Google and how that relates to the content and ads is essential to creating marketing campaigns that deliver.
This is where understanding user intent comes into play.
Users search for the same content in multiple different ways.
The exact order of the words may differ, or the user may add a modifier to their query, but overall, Google will understand that the intended meaning of the keyword is the same.
Below is a diagram that helps to display the difference between keywords and search queries.
This example shows how many different search queries can lead users to the same root keyword.
Now, you can continue using search queries and keywords interchangeably. But be aware that the difference between search queries and keywords has the power to change the way you think about marketing strategy.
How To Use Search Queries To Level Up Your Keyword Game
Ranking at the top of Google for the right keyword can mean big money for your business.
What if there was a way to leverage your audience’s actual search queries to inform your keyword research?
I will show you a three-step process that uses your audience’s search queries to level up your keyword game.
With free tools, you already have access to Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Search.
1. Discovering High-Value Pages
The first step is discovering which pages are best supporting business objectives.
Open your Google Analytics account. This example will use GA4.
Navigate to Reports > Life cycle > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
We will need to make a few edits to the default settings. At the top of the page, click “Add comparison.”
![What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords? GA4 traffic report screenshot_add new comparison is highlighted](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1655731997_892_What-Is-The-Difference-Between-Search-Queries-And-Keywords.png)
Here we will be creating a condition to change the dimension from all users to only users from organic search.
Click Include > First user source / medium and then select the dimension value “google / organic.”
![What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords? GA4 screenshot adding google organic as a dimension value](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1655731997_726_What-Is-The-Difference-Between-Search-Queries-And-Keywords.png)
You can remove the “all users” dimension by clicking on the x to make the table easier to read.
Next, we will need to add a secondary dimension to see the landing pages. Within the table, click the blue plus sign + > Page / screen > Landing page.
![What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords? GA4 screenshot_adding landing page as a secondary dimension](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1655731997_821_What-Is-The-Difference-Between-Search-Queries-And-Keywords.png)
We can drill down to see just the pages that support our business object within this table. Scroll to the right and click on the row header “Conversions.”
Doing so will sort the organic landing pages in ascending order based on the number of conversions attributed to that page.
Depending on your site traffic and business objectives, you may want to focus on specific goal completion.
For example, I want to increase chatbot conversions.
This is a specialty site with less traffic, so I will expand the date range to the last 90 days to get a good sample data set.
I’ll set conversions to “chatbot” only, and this will automatically sort my organic landing pages in ascending order.
![What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords? GA4 organic landing pages by conversion screenshot](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1655731997_221_What-Is-The-Difference-Between-Search-Queries-And-Keywords.png)
This clues me into which webpages are most effective in meeting my business objective for chatbot conversions.
I can see a pattern around crypto advertising and audience insights, so I’ll jot down these landing pages.
You may download the file in the upper right-hand corner if you have a large list.
![What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords? GA4 how to download a file screenshot](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1655731997_203_What-Is-The-Difference-Between-Search-Queries-And-Keywords.png)
Either way, as long as you have access to the exact URLs, we will use them in step two.
2. Mining For High-Value Search Queries
The most effective form of keyword research is discovering what queries users, who interact with your website in a meaningful way, are searching.
The way to do this is by researching queries instead of keywords.
Ready to roll up your sleeves and mine your high-value search queries?
Let’s go!
Open Google Search Console. Select your property from the dropdown menu in the top left, then click “Performance.”
Default settings will automatically set the search type as web and the default date range to the last three months.
Depending on the volume and seasonality of your site, this may be fine. Adjust as needed.
Click the plus sign “New” and select “Page…” in the space for URLs containing enter one of the high-value page URLs and click APPLY.
![What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords? Google Search Console_segment to view one web page](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1655731997_655_What-Is-The-Difference-Between-Search-Queries-And-Keywords.png)
On the table, click “Countries” to select the Country for which you are analyzing. Then, click back to QUERIES.
This view will show you the top search queries your audience searched for over the past three months to discover your high-value page.
The table is automatically sorted by “Clicks,” meaning a user found your webpage in search results and clicked on it.
Some of these will be similar, and others may show different search intentions. Jot down the top two to five search queries with the greatest interest (clicks) and relevance to your business.
At this point, we have a list of search queries that users have clicked on and then interacted with our website in a highly valuable way to business.
3. Expanding Horizon With Google Autocomplete
Continuing our crypto advertising example, my top search query is crypto advertising.
Now, it’s time to expand our horizons by learning what variants or related terms users may also be searching.
For this method to work, we need to adjust a few settings.
Log out of Google or open a private window to ensure your search history does not influence the results.
We want to see predictions for the location where our target audience lives. So, if the user base is in a different place than you, you’ll need to use a VPN. That’s it.
Now, open Google search and type in one of the keywords discovered in step two – but don’t press enter.
For example, if you type crypto advertising into the search bar, you will see something like this:
![What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords? Google Autocomplete example](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1655731997_237_What-Is-The-Difference-Between-Search-Queries-And-Keywords.png)
As you type, Google tries to predict what you are looking for based on the popularity of simple searches by users.
This is called Google Autocomplete.
Google Autocomplete provides a major advantage because it effectively uncovers long-tail keywords (or key phrases) most commonly searched across the web.
Long-tail keywords are usually at least three words long and communicate a clear customer need.
Let’s walk through an example of exactly how to use Autocomplete for one of our high-value keywords discovered in step two.
Enter one of the examples of high-value keywords discovered in step two and jot down any relevant queries to your audience or business.
Try going through the alphabet at the end of your high-value keyword.
For example, adding an “a” at the end to see how that changes the predictions, then “b,” etc.
![What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords? Keyword research using Google Autocomplete example_using the alphabet](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1655731997_745_What-Is-The-Difference-Between-Search-Queries-And-Keywords.png)
Try adding an underscore at the keyword’s beginning, middle, and or end.
![What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords? Keyword research using Google Autocomplete_underscore example](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1655731997_234_What-Is-The-Difference-Between-Search-Queries-And-Keywords.png)
If any keyword modifiers make sense, like how to, when to, where to, why, or specifying a demographic, niche, etc.
![What Is The Difference Between Search Queries And Keywords? Keyword research autocomplete example using keyword modifier](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1655731997_793_What-Is-The-Difference-Between-Search-Queries-And-Keywords.png)
Visit the different search engine result pages, paying special attention to the number of ads and what rich results are displayed.
Click through to the different webpages in the search results; this will help you find high-value long-tail keywords and provide hints for the user’s intent.
Takeaways
Understanding the difference between search queries and keywords is the key to creating search strategies that work.
Search queries refer to the text your audience is searching, while keywords are the terms you’re investing in.
Once you understand the relationship between these two terms, you can think of keyword research in a new way.
And tap into the potential sitting right under your nose.
Using your best customer’s search queries to discover which keywords to invest in – now that’s smart marketing.
Featured Image: Tapati Rinchumrus/Shutterstock
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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