Week 17 – Queries

It’s week 17 of the A to Z of #seo – which means Q for…

🎯 Queries

Us SEO people often refer to things like “keywords”, “key phrases” and “search terms” as queries as this how they are represented in Google Search Console – which is the tool we use to monitor site performance, crawling and indexation. (often just referred to as SC or GSC).

Google refers to queries as “The Queries report lists the Google Search queries that generated impressions of your website URLs in Google organic search results.” via their official help docs.

What is significant about queries – along with if these are increasing or decreasing – is that we can see cannibalisation of queries in SC. By this we mean do you have 1 or more pages ranking for, or trying to rank for the same query or keyword. Pages often ‘overlap’ a bit but you really want the main/best page ranking for a given term. If you see, impressions for pages split fairly evenly across 2 or more pages you are effectively competing with yourself in Organic Search.

By looking at the queries report along with the pages, you can then go to work on improving the ‘right’ page (on-page as mentioned 2 weeks ago and/or Internal links as mentioned several weeks ago) along with “de-optimising” the wrong pages. This boosts the good page. Result!