Imagine gaining insight into the exact words and phrases potential customers use when searching for products or services like yours. This valuable information, known as keyword data, can help drive targeted traffic to your WordPress website.
At WPBeginner, we take the time to understand the keywords that lead visitors to your site so we can fine-tune our SEO strategy, optimize existing content, and create new content specifically designed to attract our ideal audience.
The result has been higher search engine rankings and increased organic traffic.
So, keyword tracking basically means monitoring the position of your WordPress website for specific keywords in search engines like Google and Bing.
It helps you see important metrics, such as which specific search terms people use to find your website. This lets you focus on what’s working and stop spending time on what’s not.
When it comes to WordPress SEO optimization, we often recommend users do keyword research and add proper keywords and meta descriptions to their websites. This helps your website rank higher in search engines.
But what many beginners don’t know is that search rankings change quite often. If a new competitor enters the market or your previous competitor further improves their SEO, then you can lose the rankings that you previously had and the traffic along with it.
Sometimes, Google algorithm updates can also cause your website to increase or decrease in rankings for your top keywords.
At WPBeginner, we believe that it’s easier to double your website traffic and sales when you know exactly how people find and use your website.
With that said, let’s take a look at how to see the keywords people use to find your website.
The best way to track the keywords people use and the keywords where your website ranks is to use Google Search Console, which is a free tool offered by Google to help website owners monitor and maintain their site’s presence in Google search results.
We will show you how to connect the search console to your Google Analytics, along with how to bring those reports right inside your WordPress dashboard.
Finally, we will cover how to track not just your own keywords but also the keywords your competitors are ranking for.
Here is a summary of what we will cover:
Sound good? Let’s get started.
You can sort the data by clicks, impressions, and position columns. You can see your top-ranking keywords by sorting the data by position.
As you scroll down, you will be able to see keywords where your site appears deeper in search results. You can optimize your content to rank higher for those keywords as well.
For this method, we will be using All in One SEO (AIOSEO) to see our Google Search Console data inside the WordPress dashboard.
AIOSEO is one of the best WordPress SEO tools on the market, used by over 3 million professionals. This comprehensive SEO toolkit will help you easily optimize your site for better rankings, and it has a Search Statistics addon that lets you track your keywords.
This method has two advantages:
To get started, you need to install and activate the AIOSEO plugin on your WordPress website. If you need help, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin for step-by-step instructions.
To use the Search Statistics feature, you will need to connect your AIOSEO account with your Google Search Console account.
You’ll then be prompted to sign in to AIOSEO and you’ll need to allow the plugin to access your Google account by clicking the ‘Continue’ button.
Here, you will see a notification informing you that AIOSEO is fetching the data from Google Search Console and that it may take some time.
When AIOSEO finishes fetching the Google Search Console data, you can click on the ‘Dashboard’ tab.
MonsterInsights is the #1 Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily install Google Analytics in WordPress and shows you human-readable reports right inside your WordPress dashboard.
First, you need to install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin on your website. For more details, see our tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Also, see our guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress for step-by-step instructions.
Once you have installed and set up MonsterInsights, the next step is to connect your Google Analytics account to your Goole Search Console account.
You can now view the keywords your website ranks for inside the WordPress admin area.
In the previous method, we showed you how to connect Google Search Console to your Google Analytics account and view the reports inside your WordPress dashboard.
However, you can also view your keyword rankings inside Google Analytics.
Do you want to track not just yours but also the keywords your competitors are ranking for? This method allows you to do that with actual tips on how to outrank your competition.
We will be using Semrush for this method. It is one of the top SEO rank tracker tools on the market because it helps you get more search traffic to your website.
We use it on our many websites to gather competitive intelligence.
First, you need to sign up for a Semrush account. Note: You can use our Semrush coupon to get a better deal.
You can also enter your competitor’s domain name to download a full list of all the keywords where they rank.
As you go through the list of keywords, you will notice some of your results rank quite well (in the top 10) with significant impressions but very low CTR.
This means that users didn’t find your article interesting enough to click on. You can change that by improving your article’s title and meta descriptions. See our WordPress tutorial on how to improve blog post SEO to rank higher.
You will also see keywords where your website can easily rank higher. You can then edit those articles and improve them by adding more helpful content, adding a video, and making it easier to read.
If you are using Semrush, then you can use their Writing Assistant Tool, which helps you improve your content by making it more SEO-friendly for that particular keyword. See our guide on using the SEO Writing Assistant for more details.
We hope this article helped you learn how to see the keywords people use to find your WordPress site. You may also want to see our other guides on WordPress keywords: