How To REALLY Know What Google Thinks About Your Site

At some point you’ll inevitably wonder what Google thinks your site is about. You might be wondering why certain AdSense ads are showing up, for example, or why you’re ranking well for some terms but not for others. While there are many factors used by the ad selection and search ranking algorithms, there’s no doubt that the overall theme of a site plays a part in both. So how do you tell what Google thinks about your site?

It’s trivially easy, actually. All you need is the AdWords keyword tool. It’s a free tool available to anyone, not just AdWords advertisers. While it’s mostly used to build keyword lists and determine how profitable specific keywords are (by doing some investigation of the bid prices), it can also be used to do site-specific keyword analysis. Here’s what you do:

1. Start the AdWords keyword tool (opens new window) and click the Site-Related Keywords tab:
   
2. Adjust the language and country restrictions, if necessary, and type in the URL of the page you want to analyze:
   
   You can ask Google to consider other pages on the same site, which is useful if you’re trying to gather information about the overall theme of a site. For individual page analysis, leave this unchecked.
3. Press the Get keywords button. Google will immediately dispatch a crawler to analyze the page:
   
   The crawl is immediate, which means that any changes you made to the page since the last time it was analyzed will be reflected in the list of generated keywords — a very handy feature for fine-tuning your pages. (It’s really meant for AdWords advertisers looking to tune their landing pages to match them to the keyword groups, but it serves our purposes well.)
4. Google will then present you with the set of keyword themes that it thinks best reflect what your site is about based on the content of the pages it analyzed:
   
   Some of the themes may surprise you. Notice the inclusion of the WordPress-related keyword themes in the list above: that’s because No Debt Is Good is a WordPress blog and doesn’t (yet) attempt to hide it. (Here’s a great tip: if you’re an advertiser, create a separate ad group for each theme, it’ll really help the targeting.)
5. Keyword themes are broken down further into individual keywords, as shown in this small example:
   
   You’re also given some general information about the popularity of the keyword among both searchers and advertisers, which may steer you in one direction or another when you’re looking to fine-tune your content. For example, I should really have articles on credit card debt consolidation and debt elimination programs on my site to directly match some of these keywords.

That’s it! Repeat this process as many times as you want with any or all of your pages.

There is an important caveat to using this tool, however: the tool does not consider links from other sites in its analysis. Those links can have a huge impact on how your pages rank, especially in highly-competitive topics. There’s usually very little you can do about external links, but you can definitely work on improving the internal linkage of your site and making sure the content-based themes discovered by the tool match your expectations. This will ensure consistent ad targeting at the very least, although it should also improve your rankings in the long run.

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Eric Giguere is the author of the AdSense book “Uncommon AdSense” and the award-nominated AdSense blog “Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense”. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!

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