Queries and markets

A query in Serpward is not just the words. It is the words together with the market they are searched in: a country, a language, and a device. brandname in Germany, in German, on a phone is one query; the same words in Austria on a desktop are another. They return different pages, so they are watched separately.

Adding queries

Queries tab, then Add queries. One search per line. A volume can follow after a semicolon:

brandname
brandname official site; 1200
brandname login; 350

Then pick the market: the country, the language people search in there, and the device. The language is filled in from the country and can be changed under Advanced; the device defaults to mobile, because that is where most brand searches happen. Countries can be chosen in bulk by market tier.

Adding the same search for another market is a separate line in another market, not a setting on the existing query.

Volume

The volume is how many times a month the search is made. It is not used to decide what to collect — every query is collected regardless. It feeds the estimate of traffic an unauthorised page takes: a page in position one for a query searched a thousand times a month takes more than the same page for a query searched ten times. If you do not know the volume, leave it; the estimate is simply absent.

The volume can be edited later by clicking the number in the list.

Schedule

Each query is re-run on its own schedule; the list shows the last collection and the next one. Collection costs credits per query per run, which is why depth and frequency are project settings rather than defaults you cannot see.

Switching off

A query can be switched off without deleting it. Its history stays; it is simply not collected until switched back on. Use this for a market you are leaving or a search that turned out to be noise.

The SERP tab

Pick a query and see its latest results: position, domain, address. Above the table, a chart shows how the positions of the leading domains moved across snapshots — a page that appeared, dropped and came back is visible as a line, not as a fact you have to remember.

The results here are everything that ranked, including your own pages. What counts as unauthorised is explained in Link statuses.