How to search a website for keywords

What is website keyword research?

A website search (or site search) allows you to find specific terms on any website, including your own site or your competitors’ sites.

There are several ways to search a site for content (we’ll discuss these in detail later), but the quickest way to search a specific page is to use Ctrl+F or Command+F.

To search for keywords across an entire site, use organic search. This will allow you to see the different keywords the site is ranking for.

Why scan a website for keywords?

Using a website search, you can find accurate information about any website.

In particular, it can help you:

• Find statistics and data: Search for data on your site. This can be useful if you need to update outdated information.
• Search for specific references: Look for mentions that need to be changed, such as seasonal offers, promotions, or locations.
• Discover new ideas: Find competitor keywords to uncover topics you haven’t written about yet
• Find Backlink Opportunities: Search for keywords on niche-relevant websites to find opportunities to contact and request links to your website
• Find semantic keywords: See what semantic keywords (keywords related to a topic) you can add to your content. This will give search engines context for your articles, which will help them rank your content correctly.
• Find out how to meet search intent: Check the type of content your competitors are creating for specific keywords to determine search intent (the reason someone is looking for something).
• Finding ideas for keyword placement: See where competitors are placing their keywords in their content to get ideas for placing your own keywords.

How to search a website for keywords

1. Use keyword tools

Keyword tools provide the fastest way to search websites for keywords.

Here are two options:

Organic Research

Organic research allows you to see which keywords a website is ranking for.

To use it, enter a website (either a competitor’s or your own), select your country and click “Seek.”

Press the “Positions” to display:

• A list of keywords the site ranks for
• The URL that ranks for each keyword
• The ranking position of each web page for the specified keyword
• An estimate of the site’s organic (unpaid) search traffic
• The monthly search volume of the keyword

And more.

To evaluate the keyword rankings of a specific page, click on the URL in the “URL” Split.

Now you will see all the keywords for that particular page.

We recommend doing this for your biggest competitors.

When you create a list of keywords you want to rank for, click the arrow icon to go to the corresponding web page so you can see how each competitor covers the topics you are interested in.

For example:

• What is the format?
• Do they use a lot of visual elements?
• Is the style casual or formal?

The answers to these questions can help guide your own content efforts and help you better replicate what already works.

Keyword gap

The Keyword Gap tool shows which keywords your competitors are ranking for but you are not, so you can identify potential ranking opportunities.

Open the tool and enter your domain and up to four of your competitors’ domains. Then select your country and click “Compare.”

The resulting report shows you some tabs.

We recommend focusing on these two:

• Miss: Keywords for which you do not have a ranking, but all of your entered competitors do
• Weak: Keywords for which you rank but which are lower than all competitors entered

Study the keywords in these tabs to find the most relevant ones.

And visit each page to see how you can create better, more relevant content and publish it on your site. (You can see the top-ranking pages for each keyword by clicking the arrow icon next to the term.)

2. Use CTRL+F or Command+F

By searching for keywords on a page, you can see how often they appear and where they are located. This can be helpful when creating your own content.

Open a web page and click CTRL+F on a PC or Command+F on a Mac.

Enter the keyword in the search box that appears. All areas of the page where the keyword appears will be highlighted. Press “Enter” to see all places.

That’s a good start, but you’ll only see keywords on the page itself.

To see all the places where the keyword is actually used, you need to search for it in the HTML of the page.

First, open Chrome and right-click on the selected page. Select “View page source.”

When you see the source code of the page, hold down Ctrl+F (Command+F on Mac) and a search bar will appear.

Type the desired keyword and press Enter.

In this case, let’s search for “description”.

The command highlights every occurrence of “description” in the page’s source code.

Like this:

As you can see, when searching for keywords in HTML on websites, more cases of keyword usage are found. For example, in:

• The title tag (HTML that specifies the title of the page and may appear in search results)
• The meta description (HTML that describes the page and can also appear in search results)
• Media file names for things like photos, videos, and GIFs
• Alternative text (code that describes an image – to make it easier for visually impaired people to understand the image and also to be displayed by browsers when an image does not load)

By seeing where your competitors are placing their keywords, you can see how well they have optimized each page.

3. Use Google search operators

Google search operators are special commands that help you refine your search on Google. The site search operator lets you search for keywords on a site in three steps:

1. Open Google
2. Enter “site:[domain name](e.g. “site:www.semrush.com”)
3. Enter the keyword after the domain and enclose it in quotation marks (if the term contains more than one word).

Like this:

The results will only show pages on the specified domain that contain exactly your keyword.

If you are only interested in pages for a specific subdomain or subfolder, you can specify that as well.

For example, you will get different results if you search for “backlinks” on both “developer.semrush.com” and “semrush.com/blog”.

Here are the results for “Backlinks” on the subdomain “developer.semrush.com”.

And here are the results for “Backlinks” in the subfolder “semrush.com/blog”.

Keep these options in mind as you refine your site search.

4. Use the website’s search function

Websites often have their own search bars that allow you to search for a specific keyword.

All you have to do is:

1. Look for the search bar
2. Enter your keyword (depending on the website, using quotation marks may be useful)
3. Click Search/press Enter.

So:

This method is by far the easiest. However, not all websites offer this feature.

And even if it does, the search bar may not be optimally configured.

For example, the search function may only return matches in the page title or URL, so you get a limited list of relevant results.

5. Use the Keyword Planner

The Keyword Planner (in Google Ads) is a tool used for paid search campaigns, but it can also be used to find keywords that are relevant to a website.

Open the tool. (If you don’t have an account, follow the instructions to sign up.)

Once you have opened the tool, click on “Discover new keywords.”

Click “Start with a website“ and enter the URL of a website or page.

Choose whether you want to use the entire site or just the page. And click “Get results.”

Google will then display related keywords.

Find keywords to increase your organic traffic

There is no shortage of keywords that your website can rank for.

And with tools like Organic Research and Keyword Gap, you can check the keywords on your and your competitors’ websites to get tons of ideas about which ones to target.

Try Semrush for free to get started.