Search Analytics & Research

Frequently asked questions

How is Wordstat frequency different from real traffic?

Wordstat shows the number of impressions for a query and its variants, not the number of visits to a site. Your page will get a share of that volume depending on its position and how appealing the snippet is.

Why do the positions in the tool and in my browser differ?

Personal results take into account search history, region and device. A check without personalization shows an averaged picture – that is the one worth comparing over time.

A page is not in the index. What to check first?

Whether the address is reachable, a robots.txt disallow, a noindex meta tag, the server's response code, and whether the page has links pointing to it from within the site. An isolated page with no internal links gets crawled last.

Does a search engine use my title and description word for word?

Not always. Both Yandex and Google can replace them with a fragment of the page's own text if it answers the query better. The snippet simulator shows your version, not a guarantee it will be displayed.

How often should positions be checked?

Once a week is enough for most projects. Daily measurements show fluctuation in the results rather than the effect of actual work, and tempt people into changing a page more often than it has time to settle.

The tools in this section answer four questions: what people are searching for, who already ranks for those queries, whether your page made it into the index, and what it looks like in the results. Every check runs on a single domain or query, with nothing to install.

What search analytics is made of

Working on visibility breaks down into four steps in sequence, and each one needs its own data.

Demand. What phrasing people actually type in, and how many times a month.
Results. What pages already show up for those queries, and in what format.
Indexing. Whether the search engine knows about your page at all.
Presentation. How the title and description look in the search results.

Skipping any step undermines the rest: a page built for a query with no demand will not bring in traffic, and a perfectly written page outside the index will bring in even less.

Step 1. Collect and gauge queries

Wordstat frequency check

The Wordstat frequency check shows how many times a query was typed in over a month. Looking only at the broad frequency is risky: it includes every word form and refinement, so real demand for the exact phrasing is almost always lower.

Search suggestion collector

The Yandex, Google and Wordstat suggestion collector pulls the phrasing a search engine offers while typing. This is the audience's actual language: suggestions show what words people really use to ask a question, not how it gets phrased inside a company.

Keyword research and rank check

Keyword research and rank check ties a list of queries to a specific site and shows where it stands right now. This is a good place to start: some queries already bring in impressions, and growing those is cheaper than tackling a new topic from zero.

Step 2. Break down the results

SERP checker

The SERP checker pulls results for a query on Yandex and Google with a choice of device, region and results page. What is worth looking at is not competitors' positions but the type of pages in the top: if it is full of roundups, a single product page will not climb for that query.

Google Pixel SERP simulator

The Google Pixel SERP simulator shows a future snippet and measures the width of the title and description in pixels. The limit in the results is counted in line width, not characters, so a title made of wide letters gets cut off sooner than one that looks short.

Step 3. Check indexing

Indexed pages count

The indexed pages count gives the overall picture for a domain. A mismatch with the number of pages in the sitemap is an early sign of a problem: either some material is blocked from crawling or has been judged low-value.

Page indexation checker

The page indexation checker works on specific addresses one at a time. This is how new sections and landing pages are checked when traffic is expected but is not showing up.

Step 4. Prepare the page for the results

Meta tag generator – a title and description that account for competitors on the query.
Schema.org markup generator – structured data for a rich snippet.
Word density counter – checking that the keyword is not repeated obtrusively.
UTM builder – tagging links to separate newsletter and ad traffic from organic.

Where to start

If a site is new, start with frequency and suggestions: without demand, nothing else matters. If a site is already live, start with checking positions and indexing, because that is usually where the quick wins are. Technical causes of a drop are covered in Technical SEO & Security, and working on the text itself is covered in Content & SEO Optimization.