Most beginners manually check rankings for their articles by typing keywords in Google. This does not give you an accurate idea of where your articles stand for the target keyword.

In this article, we will show you how to easily check if your WordPress blog posts are ranking for the right keywords.

Why Check Keyword Rankings for Your WordPress Posts?

If you follow our complete WordPress SEO guide, then you will learn how to optimize each article on your website for specific keywords. This helps you get more traffic to your website.

Most beginners simply search on Google to see if their posts are appearing for those keywords. Even then, they usually only check the first or second page at best.

The issue is that sometimes your article might be ranking way below the first two pages or worst it may not even be ranking for the keyword that you want.

If you rely on manually checking your keyword rankings, then you are missing out on useful information that you can use to improve your SEO rankings and increase traffic.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to properly check keyword rankings for your WordPress blog posts. We’ll cover three different keyword reference tools, and then show how to use keyword ranking information to increase traffic to your site.

Method 1: Checking Keyword Rankings With Semrush

Semrush is one of the best SEO and keyword research tools on the market. It’s a comprehensive SEO suite with all the useful tools you’ll need.

It comes with a powerful organic research tool that can show keyword rankings for any domain name. You don’t need to type in URLs for individual articles. It will automatically fetch results for all URLs on that domain name.

Simply enter the domain name you want to look up and Semrush will get a ton of information. After that, click on the organic research tab to view the full list of all keywords your website is ranking for.

You can sort the results by position, URL, traffic, and more. You can also export the results to a CSV file and research offline using your favorite spreadsheet program.

You can also track specific keywords with Semrush, and they will track those keywords on your dashboard, so you can instantly see their performance.

Semrush can also do these things for any domain name. That means you can enter your competitor’s domain name and see which keywords they are ranking for.

You will also be able to see their paid search traffic, paid keywords, and other useful information that you can use to outrank them.

Method 2: Checking Keyword Rankings With Google Search Console

Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a set of tools offered by Google to help webmasters improve their website for search. See our guide on how to add your website to Google Search Console.

At the top of the Performance tab, you will see a graph of your website’s performance in search results.

As you scroll down, you will see the keywords data. Next to each keyword, you will see how many clicks and impressions it gets, and its position on the search results page.

You can sort this data by clicking on any column.

If you sort the list by position, then you will be able to see your top ranking keywords. As you scroll down the list, you will see keywords where your site appears lower on search engine results pages.

You can also export this data and open it with your favorite spreadsheet software.

Method 3: Checking Keyword Rankings With Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another popular SEO tool among professional marketers. It comes with an easy to use interface and tries to make information understandable even for new users.

Simply enter your website domain name in the search box, and it will create a neatly organized report with beautiful graphs and charts.

You will find all your keyword rankings under the organic keywords report.

Next to each keyword, you’ll be able to see its search volume, keyword ranking position, keyword density, and more.

Using Keyword Rankings to Get More Traffic in WordPress

Now that you have learned how to check keyword rankings for your WordPress site, let’s talk about improving your rankings.

How to Analyze Which Keywords Need Improvement

When you’re deciding which keywords to improve, it’s important to note that not all keywords are created equal.

For example, ranking #5 on a high traffic keyword is way better than ranking #1 for a low traffic keyword.

Also, appearing in the #1 position won’t always bring you the most traffic. You might notice that while some of your keywords rank pretty well, they don’t get a significant number of clicks or impressions.

During your research, you might also find some surprise keywords that you didn’t know you were ranking for.

If these keywords have a significant number of impressions and search volumes, then you should see if you can make strategic changes to your content to improve the rankings for those keywords as well.

How to Improve Rankings for Specific Keywords

After you decide which keywords you need to work on, you can go ahead and see which of your articles are ranking on those keywords and what you can do to optimize them better.

Here are a few tips.

You can find helpful suggestions on how to improve these important keywords by using the All in One SEO plugin. When editing a post, simply scroll down to the AIOSEO settings at the bottom and you will find fields for your ‘Focus Keyphrase’ and ‘Additional Keyphrases’.

Simply enter the most important keyword for the post in the ‘Focus Keyphrase’ field then click the ‘Add Focus Keyphrase’ button. You can add other keywords as additional keyphrases.

All in One SEO will now analyze your content for that particular keyphrase and will show you a score along with practical tips to improve your content for that keyphrase.

To learn more, see our beginner’s guide on how to use a focus keyphrase in WordPress.

Next, you should look for articles that are old, don’t have enough content, or contain outdated information. Updating these articles with newer information and just improving the content can give them an SEO boost.

Finally, see if you can improve your internal linking, where you link to an article from other pages of your site. Linking to an article from other related posts can give it an SEO bump. Use your target keyword as the anchor text when linking to it from other articles on your website.

For more details on this topic, please see our article on how to optimize your WordPress blog posts for SEO.

Learning What Your Visitors Do on Your Website

Semrush and Google Search Console can help you find your keyword positions, but they can’t show you how many visitors are coming to your articles, where they are from, and what they do when they are on your website.

This information is crucial when planning your content strategy to rank for certain keywords.

This is where Google Analytics comes in. It shows you the number of pageviews for your articles, your top content, your visitor information, and more.

Google Analytics can be difficult to set up for beginners, that’s why we recommend using MonsterInsights. It’s a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that will help you easily install Google Analytics and see all reports inside your WordPress dashboard.

To learn more, see our guide on how to track website visitors to your WordPress site.

We hope this article helped you check if your WordPress posts are ranking for the right keywords. You may also want to see our list of actionable tips to drive traffic to a new WordPress site, and learn how to keep your website secure.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Check If Your WordPress Blog Posts Are Ranking for the Right Keywords first appeared on WPBeginner.

What is Keyword Research and Why You Need it?

Keyword research is a research technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover words users enter into search engines to find content, products, and services in your industry.

You can then use those words and phrases into your website to get more search traffic.

Many beginners assume that they have a clear idea of what their users are looking for. However, you don’t need to make educated guesses when there are powerful tools available that can help you make data-driven decisions.

Properly using keyword research as a part of your content strategy can help you achieve the following:

• Find the popular keywords your users are actually looking for
• Find content ideas that are easy to rank for and have decent search volume
• Find out what your competitors are doing and then beat them to it with a better content strategy
• Get more search traffic and grow your audience with each new article

That being said, let’s take a look at how to properly do keyword research for your WordPress blog and boost your search traffic.

We have hand-picked the best keyword research tools that we have personally used for our own projects. We will show you each one of them and how to properly use them to do your own keyword research like a pro.

1. SEMRush

SEMRush is one of the best SEO Tools on the market. It is the complete SEO suite with tools to perform organic research, paid advertising research, keyword research, and in-depth competition analysis.

To get started, simply go to SEMRush website and enter a keyword or your website URL.

You will see an overview of the keyword you entered showing search volume (number of average searches), CPC for paid advertising, and number of search results.

Scroll down a little and you will see an overview of keywords matches and related keywords. You can click on the view full report button to explore the complete lists or export them to a CSV file.

Scroll down further and you will see the list of top search results for the keyword you entered. You can click on each of these links to view full report which will help you understand why these pages rank for these keywords.

You can also use their new ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ which gives you faster access to broader keyword research on related terms. You can click on the add button next to a keyword to add them into keyword analyzer.

Once you have figured out the best keywords with highest search volume, the next step would be to analyze competition for those keywords. Click on the links already ranking for those keywords to see a detailed analysis.

You will be able to see the backlinks for that particular URL, other keywords that page rank for, and how much search traffic it gets.

Overall, SEMRush is the best keyword research tool on the market. It not only gives you keyword ideas, it also helps you find out how you can rank for those keywords.

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most powerful keyword research tools on the market. It helps you learn why your competitors are ranking so high, and what you need to do to outrank them in search results.

Ahrefs crawls more than 6 billion pages every day, with over 12 trillion links in their index from 200+ million domain names. That’s a lot of data, but the real beauty is how their platform helps you use this data to your advantage.

It has an intuitive user interface which breaks down all the data into different sections. Simply enter a domain name in the search field and Ahrefs will pull a wealth of information in an easy to understand format.

It will show you an overview of the results with the total number of backlinks, referring domains, organic keywords, and content review. You can click on any of these sections to drill down further.

Click on ‘Organic Keywords’ report and Ahrefs will show you a list of keywords for the domain name with search volume, search rank, URL, and more.

You can also generate keyword ideas by entering keywords in the search box. Ahrefs’ keyword explorer tool will generate a list of keyword suggestions with search volume, difficulty score, and clicks.

Ahrefs also comes with powerful tools for content analysis, rank tracking, web monitoring, and more. You can export all reports in CSV or PDF format and then work on them in your favorite spreadsheet software.

3. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a free visual keyword research and content ideas tool. It utilizes Google and Bing’s auto-suggest feature and presents the data in a more understandable visual format.

Simply visit the website and enter a keyword or phrase. The tool will then load keywords and present them into visual maps. Reports are divided into questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical, and related keywords.

You can click on any keyword and it will show Google search results in a new browser tab. This allows you to quickly view the questions people are searching for, and how you can answer them with relevant content.

All keyword research is presented on a single page. You can download the data in visual format as images or export them to a CSV file and use with your preferred spreadsheet software.

More Keyword Research Tips

All the above-mentioned tools will provide you a treasure trove of data. Here are some more tips on how to narrow down your keyword research and find the most profitable ideas.

• Start your keyword research with broader keywords and then narrow it down to find keywords with low competition and more search volume.
• Enter your own URL in SEMRush or Ahrefs to see your own keyword performance and then compare it with your competitors.
• Focus on finding keywords that answer your customer’s questions and help them make a buying decision.
• Don’t limit your keyword research to most searched keywords. You can easily rank for longer keywords and build upon that.

How to apply keyword research in your business or blog?

The main goal of keyword research is to find out what your customers are looking for and then rank for those keywords in search results. There are multiple ways to do that depending on your content strategy.

• Plan a proper content marketing strategy around your new keyword research
• Create useful content articles, blog posts, infographics, videos, and more using those keywords.
• Business websites can create landing pages, documentation, FAQs and other content targeting new keywords
• If you run an online store, then you can use those keywords in your product titles, descriptions, product categories, and more.

Need help creating engaging content? Check out our expert pick of the best content marketing tools and plugins.

How do I track the performance of my keyword research?

First, you need to sign up for Google Search Console. It provides you insights into how Google views your website. You will also be able to see keywords you rank for, and average position in search results.

You will also need Google Analytics to track the performance of your content. MonsterInsights is the easiest way to install Google Analytics in WordPress. It shows you top content in your WordPress dashboard and enables you to track user engagement on your website.

We hope this article helped you learn how to do keyword research for your WordPress blog. You may also want to see ultimate step by step WordPress SEO guide for beginners.

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