Query monitoring lists the queries for which your site already appears in Yandex — up to 150,000 per site, which is far more than comparable tools typically expose, and enough to make long-tail analysis genuinely practical. The table can be read by query or by URL, each showing the strongest counterpart underneath.
Metrics, including two Google does not offer
Alongside impressions, clicks and CTR, two Yandex-specific columns change how the report is read:
- Position, which may be absent — and the absence is informative. Yandex tells you how to interpret it: check the demand column. Zero demand means nobody entered the query at all. Demand above zero with no position means users did not find the site in the results, or it was not shown for that query.
- Demand, showing how often users enter the query. Note that a site’s impressions can exceed demand where several of its results appear on one page, which is common for navigational queries. Demand is available only in the query view, not the URL view — and demand filtering follows the same restriction.
Filtering, which is where the value is
- By query text — includes, does not include, exact match, or regular expressions. A “contained in group” filter matches previously created query groups.
- By page URL — the same operators, applied to the internal path only, without protocol or domain.
- By metric — greater, less, equal and their variants, applied across a date range, keeping only rows that satisfy the condition on every date in the range. That last detail makes it a stability filter rather than a snapshot filter, which is more useful than it first appears.
- By time interval.
How we read it
Three passes answer most questions. Queries sitting just below the first page, where a small improvement produces a measurable traffic change. Queries with high impressions and poor CTR, which are snippet work rather than ranking work. And pages ranking for queries they were never written for, which usually means the topic is right and the framing is wrong.
One caution about scale
150,000 rows invites analysis for its own sake. The filters exist to reduce that to a working list; a report that presents everything communicates nothing.
How we apply this
The page-two list is where we start on almost every Yandex engagement, because improving a page that already ranks eleventh is faster, cheaper and far more predictable than creating a new winner. The regular-expression filter is the feature we use most and clients have never opened: one expression separates branded from unbranded queries, and that split changes the interpretation of every other number in the report.
Related services