How to Search for Keywords on a Website: Find a Word on a Page, Across a Site, or the Keywords a Site Ranks For

"How to search for keywords on a website" covers three different needs: locating a word on one page, finding every page of a site that mentions a term, and discovering the search queries a site targets or ranks for. The first two take seconds with the right shortcut or search operator; the third is an SEO task. This guide covers all three, from the quickest to the most detailed.

Which method fits your need?

How do you find a word on a web page?

On a computer

Press Ctrl+F on Windows, Linux or ChromeOS, or Cmd+F on a Mac. A search bar opens; type the word and the browser highlights every match and shows the count ("3 of 12"). Press Enter or the arrows to move from one match to the next. The shortcut works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, and in most PDF viewers.

On Android (Chrome)

Google's Chrome help describes the steps: tap the three-dot menu at the top right, then "Find in page", type the word and tap Search. Markers on the scrollbar show where the matches are.

On iPhone and iPad

In Safari, tap the Share button and choose "Find on Page", or type the word in the address bar and select the "On This Page" result. In Chrome for iOS, the option is in the three-dot menu, as on Android.

Find words that are not visible

Ctrl+F only searches the text displayed. To check whether a keyword appears in the title tag, the meta description, an image alt text or structured data, open the source code (Ctrl+U on Windows, Cmd+Option+U in Chrome on Mac, or right-click and "View page source") and use Ctrl+F there. Content loaded later by JavaScript does not appear in the source: in that case, use the browser's developer tools ("Inspect") to search the rendered page. Our free heading analyzer extracts the H1 to H6 of any URL, and the keyword density calculator counts how often each word appears on a page.

How do you search a whole website for a word?

With Google's site: operator

Type in Google: site:example.com "keyword". The site: operator limits results to one domain, and quotes ask for the exact wording, as described in Google's help page on refining web searches. Useful variants:

• site:example.com/blog "keyword" to search one section only.
• site:example.com intitle:keyword to find pages with the word in their title.
• site:example.com "keyword" -"other word" to exclude pages containing another term.
• site:example.com filetype:pdf "keyword" to search inside the PDF files of a site.

Two limits: Google only returns pages it has indexed, and it does not necessarily show every match. Use it to find pages, not to count them. Our definition of search operators lists the ones that still work.

With the site's own search bar

Most sites with more than a few pages have a search box, often behind a magnifying glass icon in the header. It searches content Google may not index (product filters, member areas, recent pages), but its quality varies: some only match titles. Our guide to site search explains how internal search works and what site owners can learn from it.

For a site you own

A crawler (desktop SEO crawler or your CMS's search) finds every occurrence across all pages, including those not indexed. In Google Search Console, the Performance report filtered on a query shows which of your pages appear for it. Our URL extractor lists the pages of a site so you can check them one by one.

How do you find which keywords a website ranks for?

Your own site: Google Search Console

Open Google Search Console, then Performance, then Search results. The Queries tab lists the searches that displayed your site, with clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, as described in Google's Performance report documentation. Filter on a page to see the queries of that page only, or on a query to see which pages rank for it. This is the only source of real data from Google about your rankings.

Three quick analyses to run:

1. Queries in positions 5 to 20 with many impressions: the closest opportunities, often reachable by improving an existing page.
2. Queries where two of your pages alternate: a sign of cannibalization, to fix by merging or differentiating.
3. Queries you never targeted: ideas for new content.

A competitor's site: keyword and competitor tools

You cannot open a competitor's Search Console, so you rely on estimates. SEO suites such as Semrush, Ahrefs or SE Ranking show the keywords a domain or a URL ranks for, with estimated positions and traffic. Google Keyword Planner, available inside a Google Ads account, offers a "Start with a website" option that, according to Google Ads help, looks "for keywords related to the content on that site". Comparing your keywords with a competitor's is called a keyword gap analysis. Sorank's SEO competitor spy feature does this comparison for you, and our free keyword research tool gives ideas from a seed term.

Any page: read its on-page signals

Without any tool, you can deduce the keyword a page targets by reading the title tag (visible in the browser tab and in the source), the H1, the URL, the first paragraph and the subheadings. The words repeated in these places usually are the main keyword. Our free SEO Chrome extension shows the title, meta description, headings and other SEO elements of any page in one click.

Searching for keywords on a website for SEO

Once you know how to find keywords on your own site and on competitors' sites, the next step is to decide which ones to target, one main keyword per page and its variants. That is the job of keyword research. Our guides on how many keywords per page and on keyword metrics (volume, difficulty, intent) explain how to choose. Sorank's automated keyword research analyzes your site and your competitors, finds the queries you can win and turns them into an article plan.

AI assistants add a layer: ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answer questions rather than keywords. To see which questions lead them to cite a site, you have to ask them, or track a set of prompts over time. The same reflex applies: check what exists before creating new content.

The quick rule: Ctrl+F or Cmd+F for one page, site: with quotes for a whole site, Search Console for your rankings, and a keyword tool for competitors.