These reports in Keywords Explorer show you keyword ideas related to your target keyword or phrase – also called your seed keyword or phrase.
Matching terms show you keyword ideas that contain your seed keyword.
Related terms show you keyword ideas that are taken from the top-ranking pages for your seed keyword.
Search suggestions show you keywords taken from Google's autosuggest feature. These are the search suggestions that automatically pop up as you’re typing your search query into Google.
Matching terms
There are two modes within the Matching terms report.
Terms match shows keyword ideas that contain words from your seed keyword in any order.
Phrase match shows keyword ideas that contain words from your seed keyword in the order that you entered them.
Because of this, using Terms match is great to find queries where connecting words can be valuable.
For example, if your seed keyword was "las vegas flights", using Terms match would show useful queries like “flights to las vegas”, whereas using Phrase Match wouldn't.
You can also use the “Questions” toggle to see only keyword ideas that have question modifiers (what, why, how, etc) in them.
This helps you find informational queries and find out what kind of things your target audience wants to learn.
For this, it’s best to use a broad seed when generating keyword ideas. For example, a seed phrase like “credit cards” will give you a much broader variety of questions versus something more specific like “best credit cards”.
Related terms
There are two main modes within the Related terms report as well.
Also rank for shows you keywords that the top-ranking pages for your seed keyword also rank for.
Also talk about shows you keywords that the top-ranking pages for your seed keyword frequently mention. It's a nice way to quickly find common topics that are discussed among the top ranking pages, which can be helpful for on-page SEO.
Selecting “All” will show you keywords from both reports.
The Top 10/Top 100 toggle works slightly differently for both modes here.
For Also rank for, we always take the top 10 ranking pages for your seed keyword and show all the other keywords that they also rank for. What the toggle here does is switch between showing keywords that these pages rank for in the top 10 or top 100.
For Also talk about, the toggle switches between showing frequently mentioned keywords in either the top 10 or top 100 ranking pages.
Notes
There used to be 7 main keyword ideas reports. In June 2021, we decided to streamline and simplify navigation, ending up with 3 reports and adding the ability to toggle data within each report.