To search a website for keywords, open the page and press Ctrl+F (Command+F on a Mac) to find a word on that page, or type site:example.com keyword into Google to find every indexed page on the site that mentions it. To see which keywords a site actually ranks for, you need a different tool: Google Search Console for your own site, or a third-party SEO tool for a competitor's. Each method answers a slightly different question, so the right one depends on what you're trying to find out.
Below are five methods, from the thirty-second version to the thorough one, and what to do with what you find.
1. Find a word on one page: Ctrl+F
The simplest search there is. Open the page, press Ctrl+F on Windows or Command+F on a Mac, and type the word. Your browser highlights every match and tells you how many there are. On a phone, look for "Find in page" in the browser menu.
Use it to check one page quickly. Does your commercial cleaning page actually say "commercial cleaning" anywhere besides the menu? Often it doesn't, because the person who wrote it was so used to the phrase that they described the work in every other way, from "janitorial programs" to "facility care," without ever using the words a property manager would type into Google.
2. Search a whole site through Google: site:
Type site: followed by the domain and your keyword into Google, with no space after the colon. For example, site:yourcompany.com roof coating returns pages on your site that Google has indexed and considers relevant to "roof coating."
Google's documentation on the site: operator includes two caveats worth knowing. The list of pages it returns isn't always complete, and a page that's indexed isn't guaranteed to show up. Good for a quick look. Little more.
Three useful ways to use it:
- Find duplicate pages.
site:yourcompany.com hvac maintenancemay reveal three old pages competing for the same search. - Check a competitor's coverage.
site:competitor.complus a city name shows whether they have a page for that area. - Search one section.
site:yourcompany.com/blog/ parking lotlimits results to the blog.
3. See what your own site ranks for: Search Console
Searching your site for a word tells you what's written. To see what people actually search to find you, use Google Search Console, which is free for any site you own.
The Performance report lists the queries your site appeared for, with clicks, impressions (how often you showed up), click-through rate and average position. Click any page to see just the searches that page appears for.
This is where the useful finds are. Look for searches with lots of impressions and few clicks, especially at an average position between about 8 and 20. Those are searches Google already connects with you but where you're sitting on page one's lower half or page two. A better page, or a dedicated one, can move them.
4. Crawl the whole site
A crawler visits every page on your site, the way a search engine does, and hands you a spreadsheet listing every URL along with its title, its main heading and its meta description, which is far easier to scan than clicking through a site with a few hundred pages one at a time. You can then search that sheet for any keyword at once, or spot pages with missing or duplicate titles.
Screaming Frog's SEO Spider is a common choice. As listed at the time of writing, its free version crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers most small business sites. It's a desktop program and takes a little getting used to.
5. See what a competitor ranks for
Search Console only works on sites you own. To see the keywords a competitor ranks for, you need a paid SEO platform such as Semrush or Ahrefs, which estimate rankings from their own data. Both are paid subscriptions, and their traffic figures are estimates, so use them to compare competitors with each other, not as exact counts.
A free shortcut: search your main services plus your city on Google yourself, signed out, and note who appears. That's your real competition, and it's sometimes not who you'd expect.
What to do with what you find
The point of all this searching is a short list of actions. In our experience it usually lands in one of these:
| What you found | What to do |
|---|---|
| A service you sell with no page of its own | Write one dedicated page for it. |
| Several old pages covering the same topic | Combine them into one strong page and redirect the others to it. |
| A search with many impressions and few clicks | Improve that page's title and opening paragraph so they match the search. |
| A competitor with a page for each city | Add pages for the areas you actually serve, each with real local detail. |
To check where you stand from a buyer's side, our Free AI Visibility Check looks at your website, mobile speed, whether you come up in a local search, and what an AI assistant says when a buyer asks who to call. No email needed.
If the list is longer than your week
Finding the gaps is quick. Filling them takes writing time most owners don't have.
Inbound SDR, our SEO and AI search program, starts by building a website of up to 100 pages in the first month, planned around every service you sell and every area you serve, so the gaps you just found get pages of their own. After that, a new blog goes out every business day and is posted to up to 3 social platforms, with technical SEO, listings cleanup, a dedicated strategist and a monthly report. Packages start at $1,000 per month on a 12-month term.
If your search turned up two or three missing pages and you have someone who can write them, do that first. You may not need us.
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