Imagine standing at the edge of a vast digital forest which for us would be the WWW or World Wide Web. Your mission? To lead people through this forest to find your hidden treasure: your website. But how can you guide them? The answer is – right keywords. So knowing how to find out a website’s keywords becomes the basis of your SEO success here.
This detailed guide will tell you how to filter the keywords your competitors use to reach the top of Google. Businesses that show up on the first page of Google get 92% of consumer traffic. It’s no magic, we assure you, but a tricky trade that requires you to choose the right and straight path for your audience to your website.
Let’s get started.
How to Find Out a Website’s Keywords: The Easiest & Most Effective Ways
Trying to rank your website is a journey where your compass will be the tools and techniques you’d use to find your way to the top. Here is how to find out which keywords a website is using with our tried and tested methods.
1. Conduct a Competitor Analysis with KW Research Tools
They say “keep your enemies closer” but we’d say keep your competitors closer instead. Because when it comes to SEO, you’ll be able to get a feedback and insights from your competitors and other ranked websites which no other source can rival in the slightest.
What’s more, 41% of the marketers have said that the competitor analysis helped them come up with successful strategies on a search engine like Google.
Start with tools like Semrush, google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs for a site search. Here’s how to use them to find out SEO keywords of a website within mere seconds.
How to Use Ahrefs to Find the Competitor Keywords
- Go to Ahref’s site explorer and enter the URL of the website you want to analyze and find keywords. You will have to adjust the settings as per your requirements for the entire website, a single URL or a path. Enter “Search” after adding the URL.
- Now go to the “Organic Keywords” report. There you will see a comprehensive list of all the keywords that the website (or that exact URL) ranks for on Google.
- If you want to know more about the selected keywords, Ahref’s site explorer will also provide you different metrics like search engine results for those keywords, their keyword difficulty and also their ranking histories.
How to Use Semrush to Find the Competitor Keywords
- Go to the Organic Research Tool on Semrush website. Enter your competitor’s website here and click on “Search”.
- You’ll then be shown a comprehensive overview of that website. Go to the “Positions” tab where all the keywords of the site will be listed by the percentage of traffic they are pulling from Google.
- To export and download the data, check the boxes of the keywords that seem to be relevant to your needs and audience and then click on “Export” and choose “Selected” to download the file in your desired format.
How To Use Google Keyword Planner To Check the Latest Trends
The best place to hide a dead website is the second page of Google search. Hence, it becomes highly irrelevant if you don’t rank in the top 10 or 20 of an organic search. So to make sure that your website does not end up buried that way, you can use Google Keyword Planner, a free keyword tool to analyze your worldwide competition.
It was once known as Google Adwords and is an absolutely free-to-use tool that analyzes the data from the 8.5 billion searches conducted through Google to search for keywords.
Though it won’t give you the option to know exactly what keywords your competitors uses to rank, it will provide some close estimates about the traffic and search volume of the keywords you want to use.
- Go to the Google Keyword Planner home page and select “Discover new keywords”. Now enter the keywords you want metrics for in the search bar and hit “Get results”.
- The results will show you all the metrics of those keywords including the monthly search volumes and competition levels.
- The “Keyword ideas” and the “Competition” columns will tell what your competitors are usually using to rank their own content and how hard it will be to rank the content with your own keywords based on the volume and competition metric.
Recent researches have shown us that long-tail keywords (phrases containing three or more words) are responsible for up to 70% of all search traffic so try to focus on them as well in your keyword strategy.
2. View the Page Source and Use CTRL + F
This method is useful if you are not 100% sure which keyword your competitor’s website is primarily ranking and will work well in most browsers. With this, you will know the density of the probable keywords in the content and confirm which one is the primary KW being used in the content for search engine optimization.
Here’s how you can do it.
- Simply right-click after opening the web page of your desired website/URL and select “View Page Source” on the pop-up window. You can also use the shortcut CRTL + U to open that webpage’s HTML code in a separate tab.
- Now write your desired keyword in the search field and hit enter. The exact phrase/words will be highlighted in the HTML code for you to scrutinize. For example, suppose you are looking for some buyer intent keywords. Simply type your desired KW, like ‘sale’ in the search box and it’ll be highlighted in yellow throughout the page’s text.
Keep searching for different phrases and keywords you think that content is ranking for. Here’s how you can confirm the exact key phrase your competitor is using:
- Check the title of the webpage’s content to find keywords. As with most SEO practices, the main keyword is usually used once in the title. Use the CTRL + F feature and look for the < title > tags in the HTML code.
- Now check for the meta description as well using the same CTRL + F feature. The meta description is supposed to use the primary keyword at least once or twice and may also include the related keywords your competitor is using.
- Search the headings and subheadings by typing “h1,” “h2,” “h3,” and so on into the search box. If that page is properly SEO optimized, these headings will also contain the exact keywords.
With these searches, you should be able to build a list of the best keywords and even find the exact primary keyword that is helping the webpage rank on Google.
3. Use Google Search Operators To Understand Content Structure
Sometimes, it so happens that you already know the keywords that your competitor blog is ranking for. In that case, you may want to know the exact content and its structure being used by them that is helping with the SEO optimization. This can be done by using the Google Search Operators.
This technique lets you search only that specific website for any terms instead of the whole web. Here’s how to do it.
- Go to the Google search bar and type your competitor’s website in the format “site:www.anywebsite.com”. This “anywebsite” part should be the website name you want to search the KWs on. Now leave a space and then type the keywords/phrases you want to search on that website. The whole search query should look like this: “site:www.anywebsite.com your keywords”. The results will show you the webpages of the site that use those keywords in their content.
- Another method to identify competing sites is to search the URLs that include your specific keywords. Go to the Google search bar and type “inurl: your keyword” and hit enter. This will show all the websites with the exact keyword match in their URLs.
FAQs on How to Find Out a Website’s Keywords
How does Google extract keywords?
Google’s algorithms are pretty sophisticated and they also keep changing regularly so nobody knows exactly which factors account for how much while ranking a website.
However, generally speaking, Google uses a combination of textual analysis and machine learning to understand the search intent and categorize the context and relevant keywords on your webpage. It pays close attention to your title tag, meta descriptions, headings and the body text (among other factors) to determine if your page is rankable or not.
How do I search for a word in a long website?
Using the ‘Find’ or ’Search’ function. Press Ctrl + F (or Command + F on a Mac) to open a search box where you can type the word or phrase you want to look for.
How do I search within a website?
By using search operators. Type site:websiteURL.com “search term” into Google’s search bar to see the search results from a specified domain.
How do I find out what keywords are used on a website?
SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs and Moz can show the keywords for which your competitor’s site appears in search results. These tools analyze a site’s content and backlink profile to identify the searched terms.
How do I find the primary keywords for my blog?
First, you have to understand your niche and audience. Begin by brainstorming topics that are directly related to your blog’s theme. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner and AnswerThePublic to pinpoint your primary keywords and then expand this list with related search terms and questions your audience might be asking.
Conclusion
You don’t need to look for anything magical to discover the perfect keywords for your website. But it does demand the right combo of the tools and a good eye for analysis to understand how to find out a website’s keywords.
With a thorough competitor analysis with Google and other keyword research tools, you’ll be able to create the exact SEO strategy for success and also leave an impression on your audience that will actually last for longer.
So start this journey with curiosity and the willingness to adapt. Because in the changing world of SEO, today’s insights are highly likely to be tomorrow’s victories.