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The Main Difference Between Keywords & Search Terms

Ed

The Main Difference Between Keywords & Search Terms

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If you’re quite new to the digital advertising be it on Facebook or Google ads, you’d probably read or heard of the terms “keyword”, “search term” or “search query” and might read or heard it being used interchangeably. It’s a common issue since those terms are closely related, but they have different meanings.

And yes, both are critical components of pay-per-click advertising.

Keywords vs. search terms

A keyword or search keyword is the exact word or phrase that advertisers use to target in their paid campaigns.

For example, you have a food delivery service so you would want to bid for the search keyword “food delivery service” and also include it in your ads headline and description.

In addition, in Google Ads you can set a specific amount of bids that you want for a keyword.

Your search keywords will define the success of your search campaign.

A search term or query is the actual word that a user typed in on a search engine platform.

These words or set of words can be out of order or have other words in between but it’s always related on the actual search term. Even misspelled words are included, but Google will automatically correct it or will suggest it.

What’s the difference & how do they relate?

The difference between the two are actually situational, why situational? Because it really depends who uses them and why:

Most of the time, users are not even sure what search terms that they are going to type in search engines that will cause your ad to appear. Users just type words into search box and just hoping to find the information they needed on a specific product or service.

While advertisers and marketers use search terms or queries to make sense out of them and strategize the keywords that will match and use for their campaign and ads. It’s also important to note that it’s impossible to target every single search term that a user types into search engines.

Here’s an example of what might a user will type into search engines:

Now as an advertiser/marketer these would be the relevant keywords that you will use:

Hopefully that explanation helps in understanding what Search Keywords are vs. Search Terms/Queries. And you can use this information to your advantage and improve your search campaign.

Use search terms to your advantage

Every campaign starts with a keyword. And advertisers rely heavily on bidding keywords for their search campaigns and hopes that users will type those words from the keywords they bid on, which will then trigger their text ads which hopefully will turn clicks into conversions.

But this is the reality though, your search keywords aren’t really the words that users type in, keywords are actually represents what your potential customers might want to type.

So in short, Search terms/queries are the reality and as an advertiser, it’s your role to make sense of this and expand from those terms/queries.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say you’re targeting a keyword for your business of “dental service”. And with the help of search term, you can expand the search terms around your target keyword:

And what if a user didn’t include “dental service” on their search term/query? This is why it’s important to take a step further and discover other relevant search terms/queries:

As you can see knowing and recognizing relevant search terms will help you develop more targeted keywords.