Are You Using The Right Keywords To Be Found By Google? (2 Tools To Check)

So you’ve spend the past few months, working hard on your website, improving the way everything looks and works, reading about UX and call to actions, curating your best content, writing new articles as recommended by How To resources and SEO gurus – but you still find yourself struggling with getting more traffic to your website and more inquiries for your services (or product)? Yeah, we get how that feels.. 

Truth is, there may be multiple reasons why you haven’t yet enjoyed fruitful results for all your hard work. One of them is – you’re not using the right keywords to be found online by Google and your clients. OR, even if you are using the right keywords – are you sure they are the ones that highlight for your page?

In this quick tutorial we’ll explain to you how to check which are the most prominent keywords on your pages and blog posts, using various free or paid tools. This should help you understand how Google (and other search engines) perceive your content and topics, as well as highlight whether you need to make any improvements to rank better organically.

Why using the right keywords matters?

The way you rank on search result pages depends on multiple factors – your keywords, your domain authority, how user friendly and mobile friendly is your website, and tons of other criteria. The higher your ranking is, the more chance you have to get found by new users and clients. 
Since we’re focusing on keywords in this article, there are 2 things you need to keep in mind: 

• use keywords that are relevant to your business, services and potential clients. What’s the point in bringing users to your website who are not interested (or will ever be) in your services?
• the content is as important as the keywords, and should satisfy the user’s search intent. It should be relevant, valuable and useful, as there’s nothing more disappointing for a user and harmful for your SEO, then alluring someone to your site with a click bait title, then providing something completely irrelevant to what they clicked on initially. 

Back to our main question – are you using the right keywords to be found by Google? Let’s find out. Here are 2 ways you can check the most prominent keywords on a page or blog post:

Tool #1: Using Yoast SEO Premium (paid)

If you have a premium account with Yoast you’ll be able to see your most popular on-page keywords directly in your admin area. To do that: 

• Open any page or blog post
• Scroll down to Yoast SEO premium section
• Open the Insights section. If you are using Gutenberg editor, you can also access this section from your top-right corner icon
• Check the Prominent words report

Here is an example of a web page taken from one of our client’s website.

Note: Yoast will scan all your back end content including custom fields, so you might end up with weird prominent keywords. Some custom code might be scanned by Yoast too and included in your analysis results. If this is your case, we recommend using a tool that scans solely your front end content. More on that below.

Tool #2: Keyword Density Analysis Tool (free)

This is a handy tool that scans solely the content on your page and shows which are the most used keywords. You simply input your URL and get a brief report listing the amount of words and keyword density for your content.

Here is an example for the same page we used with Tool#1:

What can be improved?

As you can see, this page doesn’t have enough textual content (less than 100 words) and doesn’t mention keywords related to this wedding venue: The Art Hotel. The author should write more about this particular ceremony and venue. Important keywords like: “photography”, “wedding”, “art hotel”, etc. could be placed in headings, paragraphs or even image file names & alt attributes. Also, meta titles, descriptions and URLs should always contain prominent words.

One more important note on keywords

We hope the 2 tools described above will help you better understand your website traffic, which keywords are you ranking for and whether those are the keywords you actually want to be found by. If you discover that you’re current prominent keywords are wrong, take the time to adjust your content and improve the topics you’re marketing and clientele you’re attracting. 

Know that there is no ideal keyword density (diverse sources state that 3-5% is a good keyword density), so instead of simply stuffing your pages with keywords, focus on providing high quality content using natural language. The most successful copywriters have mastered the art of writing as if you’re having a friendly conversation on the couch with a friend. Write, then read it out loud. If it flows smooth, sounds good, clear and captivating – you’re on the right track. Always write for your website visitors, not for search engines. Good luck!

Flothemes Team