Among the many things you might want to know about a competitor’s website is the keywords they’re targeting. It’s actually pretty simple to do, so here are 3 ways for how to find out what keywords a website is using.
How to Find Out What Keywords a Website is Using
1 – Check The Title
The fastest and most obvious way is to just check a page’s title. You can get a very good idea of what keyword they’re going after here because it’s the most important place to feature the keyword.
Just remove the sizzle/click bait or irrelevant copy in the title. It’s typically pretty simple to spot, like in these examples where the keywords are bold:
5 Puppy Training Tips to Fix Bad Behaviors
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If a page is targeting a keyword, this is where it will be.
2 – Check the HTML Source Code
Code doesn’t lie.
While on the page you’re checking, hold Ctrl and press U. In Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, Ctrl+U shows the source code in HTML for that page.
Specifically it shows the title, description, and (in rare cases) the antiquated meta keyword tag.
Once you get an idea of the keyword they might be targeting, you can search for every instance of it in the code. If it’s featured in the title, description, and throughout the content, you know this is the keyword they are actively targeting on that page.
3 – Use a Tool
Keywords Everywhere (one of the tools from my free keyword tool review) , Spyfu, and KeywordSpy are just a handful of freemium or premium tools which allow you to see which keywords a competitor is targeting.
Personally I like to use KeySearch (premium keyword tool). Not only is it my go to keyword tool, but it has a number of additional features.
In this case, the “Organic Keywords” feature under the “Competitive Analysis” tab literally shows you every prominent keyword a website (or page) is targeting.
From there you can drill down and see how optimized they are for it and your chances of outranking them. I’ll be doing an entire breakdown of my favorite keyword tool soon, but besides the fact that it’s a premium tool, this is an effective way for how to find out what keywords a website is using.
4 – Reverse Check With a Google Search Query
Doing a technical Google search query with special search operators is another way of how to find out what keywords a website is using.
It can be used in two different ways.
First, you can get a complete list of every page on a website by searching for its URL with:
site:example.com/
This gives you a huge list of titles the site is using. Consequently this gives you a huge list of keywords the site is using (in going back to the first point).
Second, you can see if any pages on a website target a specific keyword you’re curious about with:
site:example.com/ intitle:keyword
Use the above search query replacing the “example.com” with the site URL and the keyword with the one you’re checking.
This is a good way to reverse engineer and see if a site is targeting your keyword anywhere.
5 – Use Google Ads’ Keyword Planner
Google’s keyword planner is a free tool for getting keyword ideas and vague ideas of search volume and competition for them.
But it can also be used to get an idea of the keywords any website or page is targeting. Simply type the URL for either the domain or a specific page and you’ll get a list of relevant keywords for it.
This doesn’t guarantee that these are the keywords they’re using, but it’s a logical jumping off point.
Just because you know the keywords another site or page is using doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to outrank them for it.
And remember one of the rules from my article on how to know what keywords to use for SEO. A keyword can be bringing a competitor in a boatload of traffic but if there’s no value behind the keyword’s intent, it’s of no use to you OR them.