What questions does your site answer?

The premise: position depends on how well the site’s content matches the wording of queries. Yandex draws the blunt conclusion — if a query contains a term that appears nowhere on your pages, the engine is unlikely to consider your site a good answer, and the page may be excluded with the low-value or low-demand status.

The exercise

Put yourself in the position of a potential visitor. How would you look for this? What would you type? The gap being described is the everyday one between how a business names what it sells and how customers ask for it.

Wordstat, used properly

Enter a word or phrase describing the product. The left column shows queries containing it; the right column shows related queries — synonyms and broader or narrower phrasings — and that column is where the non-obvious demand is. Volumes are monthly and can be filtered by city or region. Yandex adds the caution that popularity varies considerably with seasonality and world events, so a single month is a weak basis for a decision.

The console reports that follow

• Search query statistics — the site’s own query data.
• Query groups — the queries for which the site reaches the top 50, averaged over 7 days.

And from Metrica

• Search queries — the terms that actually brought visitors.
• Search engines — which engines those visitors came from.

How the two halves fit together

Wordstat describes the market; the console and Metrica describe your position in it. Working from only the first produces target lists disconnected from what the site can realistically win; working from only the second means never discovering demand you do not yet serve. The useful analysis compares them: high demand where the site has no presence is the opportunity, and it is also the honest test of whether the content answers a question anyone is asking.