Keywords are the starting point for pretty much everything in SEO. Think about it: SEO is about optimizing our online collateral for one particular keyword or another.
If you don’t get it right, though, all that optimization means nothing. This is why knowing how to search websites for keywords is so important to SEO success. It is also critical to have a few different ways of checking keywords for a website to cover all your bases. Conducting keyword research from scratch is one way. Looking at your competitor’s keywords is another.
You should note that this post is about how to find a website’s keywords instead of fresh keyword research. If you’d like to know more about fresh keyword research, check out our tips for keyword research in 2023.
What happens when you search websites for keywords?
When you search websites for keywords, you’re strategically looking for specific keywords or topic ideas. If you’re looking to check keywords on your website then you’re evaluating performance. Similarly, if you’re checking for keywords on another website, you’re looking for ideas from your competitors. This is a common practice in the SEO world during competitor analysis or when looking for opportunities to rank.
There are many ways to find a website’s keywords, but we’ll give you three methods below. Before we get started, let’s first understand why you should consider doing this.
Why should you find SEO keywords for a website?
Find a website’s keywords to identify high-ranking content
When you search the SEO keywords for a particular website, you see its best-ranking content. Analyzing first-page content is the only way to make it to the first page yourself.
Knowing what’s ranking well for a specific keyword shows you the user’s intent, and satisfying search intent is critical if you want to connect with your users. Learning how to search for a keyword on a website can also give you the ability to analyze how keywords are used and where they’re placed in the content.
Check keywords of a website to plug keyword gaps
Your audience can use different keywords to search for the same thing. For example, “water filters” and “water purifiers” are closely related keywords that yield similar search results. You don’t want to miss out on a great opportunity to get in front just because of phrasing.
Checking SEO keywords for a website can help you find related keywords and plug any keyword gaps in your own website content. The best content often ranks for more than one keyword!
Find website keywords to discover new keyword ideas
SEO is a long game, but you also need to make sure you’re not producing repeat content. If you’re committing to SEO content marketing consistently, it’s likely that you’ll start running out of keywords at some point. When you check keywords on a website owned by your competitor, you generate new keyword ideas and continue your content creation. you generate new keyword ideas and continue your content creation.
How to search for keywords on a website: 3 methods
Now, let’s talk about how to conduct a strategic search for SEO keywords on your competitor’s website. While the three methods below can be stand-alone approaches, they can also be combined into a sequence.
The keyword data you decipher will become more nuanced and granular as you progress through them. This helps you whittle down an extensive list of keywords to just a few that you can actually work with. Then, all you have to do is integrate those keywords into your content strategy.
Method 1: Search a website for keywords with keyword research tools
Let’s start by casting a wide net. Your goal is to find all the SEO keywords that your competitor’s website ranks for. Analyzing their best-ranking pieces of content will point you toward keywords that you should be targeting as well. This process is known as content gap analysis.
A website could potentially rank for hundreds of keywords between primary and secondary keywords, and there’s no way you can perform this step manually. A great SEO tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz Pro is the most efficient way to do this.
When you perform a keyword gap analysis with a tool, you end up with a large volume of keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t yet. If you find that you’re targeting similar keywords, great! You’re on the right track.
Using these tools still requires a thorough knowledge of SEO strategy, which is why so many of our clients trust us to take this off their plates. Our SEO experts at Ranq specialize in keyword research to identify and deploy the most tactical keywords for capturing an audience and converting them to customers.
Method 2: Check keywords on websites with Google search operators
When doing keyword research yourself, you’re looking for keywords you’ve not targeted and new keyword ideas. You can move on to the next method to find SEO keywords for a website when you’ve found some.
Using Google’s site search operators is a great way to build upon the data you’ve found with your content gap analysis. What you’ve found so far are keywords that your competitors may be ranking for and that you need to target. Here’s how to move ahead.
Start by analyzing how your competitors are using those keywords. This includes everything from how many pages they have that target a particular keyword to which sections of the website contain those pages. An SEO tool can only help with the first step of this entire process, but with Google search operators, you can easily sift through search results per your needs.
Let’s see some examples.
Open Google and type “site:” followed by the name of your competitor’s site, then type the keyword. Now, Google will only search the website you plugged in and show you all the pages that contain the specific keyword. You can start with a broad match and easily shift to a phrase match simply by enclosing your keyword in quotes.
If you want to know how many blog articles your competitors have that contain a particular keyword, use the site search operator followed by “/blog” and add your keyword.
With search operators, you can turn a set of keywords into an actionable plan you can execute. Here’s a more exhaustive list of Google search operators to analyze your competitor’s content.
Method 3: Find SEO keywords of a website with Ctrl + F in page source
With the first method, you looked broadly at your competitors\’ websites, and with the second, you delved into their website sections like blogs, resources, etc. If you want to get even more granular with the results you found, use Ctrl + F in the page source.
Open the webpage you want to analyze, right click and select “View page source.” Now you can Ctrl + F your way to pretty much anything you want. Type in your keyword, and you can see all the different ways the keyword has been used and where they’re located on the page.
You can also analyze how your competitor has carried out on-page SEO and optimized their pages. Further, you can even check that page’s meta descriptions and title tags.
Analyzing the page source is the most nuanced and detailed way to look at individual pages. It’s important to know that, with this method, you can only tackle one page at a time. This is why this technique is best deployed when you need the most detailed insights for a specific page.
Further, it’s best to know which pages are worth this detailed investigation to get the most valuable results for the time you invest.
No time to learn how to search a site for keywords? Give Ranq a try!
Now you have three different methods for how to find keywords for a website, and each can be combined with one another to narrow down your research. Once you have a few keywords to work with, all that’s left to do is get on with content creation!
If you’re finding keyword research too time-consuming, have Ranq take care of it for you! We have a world-class team of SEO and content strategists that curate keyword research methodology specific to your business needs. That means your content creation process will never stall due to a lack of high-quality, traffic-generating keywords. If you think that’s what you need, contact us today!