Additional characteristics of search queries

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Knowing the main groups into which key phrases are divided is not enough for effective website promotion. Other indicators are no less important.


Competitive queries

Promotion by a search phrase common to a large number of optimized resources is associated with significant expenditure of time and resources. If there are many high-quality sites in the marketing list of senior homes top, it will take a lot of effort to displace one of them and take its place.

Competitive queries are:


Highly competitive (VK). As a rule, these are phrases like "buy a smartphone";



Medium competitive (MC). They are characterized by the presence of a clarifying word - "buy a Xiaomi smartphone";



Non-competitive or low-competitive (NC). Contain a detailed description of "buy Xiaomi Mi5 64Gb black".


When determining the competitiveness of a search key, optimizers face serious problems: the margin of error is too large. The best way out of this situation would be to analyze twenty competitors from the top of the search results.

Particular attention is paid to sites ranked 11–20. Among them, there are irrelevant and simply weak sites, with which it is quite possible to compete for a place in the sun. But the top 10, as a rule, are occupied by very strong resources that have not given up their leadership for years. It is extremely difficult to “push out” such a “bison”.



Commercial inquiries

This type includes key phrases that are entered by users to search for the product or service they need, i.e. they are also transactional, since they imply a subsequent action - a purchase or order. The other types of queries listed above are non-commercial.

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A very small group of search words can be considered either entirely commercial or informational. As a rule, we are talking about the predominance of one or the other characteristic, while both components are present to one degree or another.

Additional characteristics of search queries

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Signs that a request is more commercial than informational:


the presence of marker words “buy”, “price”, “how much does it cost”, “order”;



indication of the name of the settlement;



most of the pages at the top of search engine results are selling pages;



some time ago, the presence of Yandex.Direct advertising blocks was considered a clear sign of a commercial request. In practice, it turned out that without manual analysis of sites, it is impossible to say this with 100% accuracy.




Vital requests

Often, the user enters only the brand name in the line, without using any additional words. Such keys are called vital. In this case, the search engine and assessors put the site of the company whose name is identical to the key phrase on the first lines of the results.



Spectral queries

If a search engine receives a search phrase from which it is unclear what exactly the user meant and what result he expects, it offers several options at once, one of which will certainly be relevant.