If we talk about digital advertising, people often get confused between search terms and keywords as a result they interchangeably use them. Although both terms are a critical component of PPC marketing, both have different meanings. To learn the nuances of the digital advertising industry, it is important to clearly understand the difference between these terms.

Let’s get started.

Search Term vs Keyword
Search terms are the words or phrases that a user enters in the search box of search engines like Google to get the information they want.
On the other hand, Keywords are the exact words or phrases chosen by the advertisers to target their audience.

What do you do when you want to find some information regarding a topic online?

You immediately open your search engine and type in your query in the search box. Whatever words or phrases you type in the search box are called search terms.

Once you click on enter, the search engine returns many results.
Some of them are displayed on the first page of search results and some on the pages later?
How does the search engine decide which result to display on top of the page and which one on the bottom?

It depends upon which keyword that matches closely with the search term you enter.
The marketers make use of keywords to get those SERP rankings.

How are these two terms linked?

If the search term entered by the user aligns (to some extent) with the keyword targeted by the advertiser then those ads or products have the chances to get displayed higher on SERP. So, the advertisers or marketers analyse the search queries related to their product or service and decide keywords for their ad. The motive is to understand how users are searching for a product or service and based on that selecting keywords that will guide their way towards your business.

Now you know why content writers focus on specific keywords?

Because they try to drag their target audience towards their content by using specific keywords. But then again, it will entirely depend upon the search term entered by the user.

For example : A user types “ Best Digital Marketing Institutes” in the search box. All those pages having “Digital Marketing” as their keyword will be displayed. This happens because the search term “Best Digital Marketing Institutes” aligns with the keyword “ Digital Marketing” and the pages targeting this keyword get displayed.

So , you can say that while searching for a query , the user is unaware of the keywords being used by the marketer. While the marketer uses the search engine query analysis to focus on a specific keyword for their product or service.

Although both search terms and keywords are closely related, there is a major difference in them depending on who uses it.

●Search terms are used by users to research information online.
●Keywords are used by marketers to create their SEO and PPC campaigns

So, search terms can be random or disordered but keywords are strategically planned to make the target audience reach your page. By using search queries , marketers find new keywords to target their search marketing campaign.

Basically while targeting a keyword , marketers choose which real world search query their products or services match upto.
Keywords work as connectors that connect the search query of users with your product or service. The more strong and related your keywords will be the more strongly the search queries will connect with your product or service.

For example : For the search queries like:

●How to make dalgona coffee?
●Recipe of Dalgona coffee
●Things needed to make Dalgona coffee
●Places that serve Dalgona coffee
●Stores that sell Dalgona coffee
The suitable keyword would be “ Dalgona coffee” instead of just “Coffee”.

Knowing the differences and relation between search terms and keywords , you can use this information in multiple ways to improve your marketing campaign.

How to use this Information?

You can use this information in the following ways:

●Recognise all the related search queries to develop more targeted keywords
●Use Google keyword search term report to analyse and rebuild your keyword. This report shows which keywords in your ad campaign match the search term of users
●Manage your keywords by adding high performing search terms as keywords

Keywords work as the key that opens the door for search terms to reach your product or service. Once you know the difference between the two terms , it gives a clear cut image of how to use them with one another to reach your target audience.