How to See Google Analytics Keywords for Your Website

GA4 tracks almost everything about how people land on your site: the device they used, where they came from, how long they stayed.

The one thing it won’t show you is the actual words someone typed into Google to get there. That’s deliberate — Google strips out the specific search term for privacy reasons.

The first time I went looking for a “Keywords” tab in GA4, I expected it to just be there. It isn’t, and that catches almost everyone off guard at least once.

The good news: that data still exists, and it isn’t hidden. Google Search Console is where it actually lives, and once you know where to look, reading it is straightforward.

This guide covers where to actually find your Google Analytics keywords and how to read what you find. It also digs into what most site owners miss once the data is in front of them.

In This Article:

Why Track the Keywords Your Site Is Already Ranking For

Keywords are vital when it comes to getting ranked on Google and getting found by your audience.

When you can see which search terms send you the most organic traffic, you’ll gain insight into your site’s rankings and performance on search engines. You can also:

• Validate your SEO strategy: Compare your targeted keywords with the actual terms bringing traffic to see if your SEO approach is working
• Identify content opportunities: Find Google Analytics SEO keywords you’re ranking for that you haven’t intentionally targeted
• Optimize underperforming content: Spot keywords with high impressions but low clicks that need improvement
• Understand user intent: Learn exactly what your audience is searching for to better serve their needs
• Create more targeted content: Develop new content around proven high-performing keywords

Understanding your keyword rankings also helps identify content gaps. By analyzing which Google Analytics keywords are working, you can build on that success rather than starting from scratch.

By creating more useful, high-quality content around a keyword your site is already seeing a high rank and traffic for, you can further boost your search engine rankings and organic traffic.

How to See Your Google Analytics Keywords: 4 Ways to Find Search Query Data

You can’t use Google Analytics itself to see keyword rankings — it doesn’t show that data, for privacy reasons. Instead, the data has to come from Google Search Console, either directly or through a tool connected to it.

That data lives in four places, ranging from a quick WordPress dashboard view to a dedicated SEO platform.

1. See Your Search Keywords Report Right Inside WordPress

The most direct route to this data without leaving WordPress is MonsterInsights’ Search Keywords Report, which pulls straight from your connected Search Console account.

The report lists your top 50 search queries — the exact phrases people typed into Google — next to clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position for each one.

Impressions are how many times your listing showed up in search results. CTR (click-through rate) is the percentage of those impressions that actually turned into a click. The Search Keywords Report requires the Plus plan or higher, and a Search Console account connected to your site.

To see it, open Insights » Reports from your WordPress dashboard, then switch to the Search Console tab at the top of the report.

The report shows your search impressions, clicks, average CTR, and average position, plus a tabbed graph above the full Search Terms table.

Once that report is open, you don’t have to sort through it by hand. Ask Charlie Chat — MonsterInsights’ built-in AI assistant — something like “which keywords brought me the most traffic last month,” and it pulls the answer straight from your data instead of you scanning the table yourself. Charlie Chat is included on every MonsterInsights plan, including Lite, so there’s no upgrade required to use it.

Charlie Chat opens as a side panel with a handful of suggested starter questions about visitors and traffic sources, plus an open text field for typing your own — including a keyword question that isn’t one of the defaults.

That single report and a quick question to Charlie Chat can save you a trip to Search Console entirely for a fast check.

2. Connect Search Console to GA4 and Check the Acquisition Reports

If you’d rather stay inside GA4 itself, you can pull the same query data in through a Search Console integration.

First, connect your GA4 property to Search Console. In your GA4 property, go to Admin » Product links » Search Console links, then follow the prompts to link the two accounts.

(This nav path reflects GA4’s interface as of this writing — Google reorganizes its admin menus periodically, so double-check the exact wording if it looks different on your screen.)

For a full walkthrough of that connection process, see our guide on connecting Search Console to your WordPress site.

Once the two are linked, head to Reports » Library and publish the Search Console collection — it’s unpublished by default, so it won’t show up in the left nav until you turn it on. Once it’s published, you’ll see two Search Console reports waiting there.

Those two reports cover different things. One shows your organic landing pages, and the other shows organic search queries. Click into whichever one matches what you’re after.

The organic search queries report is the one that matters for keyword tracking. It lists each query next to its clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position.

If a query shows a decent position but a thin click count, that combination is usually the fastest place to start improving your listing.

3. Check Your Queries Directly in Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the direct source this data comes from, so you can read it there without any other tool in the mix.

Sign in to Google Search Console with your Google account, then click Search results in the left-hand menu. That view opens with a graph of your total clicks, impressions, average CTR, and position.

Scroll down from there to the Queries table, which lists the actual search terms people used to find your site.

You can also switch over to Pages, Countries, Devices, Search Appearance, or Dates to slice the same data a different way.

For more ways to put this report to work, see our guide on getting more from Google Search Console.

4. Use a Dedicated SEO Tool Like Semrush

http://monsterinsights.com/refer/semrush/For a deeper, competitor-aware view, a dedicated SEO tool like Semrush shows ranking data Search Console doesn’t track at all.

Semrush is a paid SEO platform with tools for organic keyword research, paid advertising research, keyword gap analysis, and competitor keyword tracking. If Search Console feels limited, Semrush is built to go well beyond it.

It’s a bigger investment than a free Search Console account, so it’s worth considering once you’ve outgrown the basics rather than as your first stop.

Understanding Your Google Analytics Keywords Report

The Google Analytics keyword reports (through Search Console integration) provide several key metrics that help you evaluate your website’s performance:

• Queries: The actual search terms people used to find your site
• Clicks: How many times users clicked on your site’s listing in search results
• Impressions: The number of times your site appeared in search results
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click
• Position: The average ranking of your site in search results for each query

Okay, now how do you actually use the keyword data to grow your business? Here are a few examples:

• Identify high-performing keywords: Discover which Google Analytics search terms are effectively drawing traffic to your site and optimize your content to target these terms more.
• Spot opportunities: Identify relevant keywords with high impressions but low CTR. This combination suggests that your ranking page might not be perfectly aligned with the users’ search intent.
• Refine your SEO strategy: Use the average position metric to understand how well you compete in search rankings for your targeted keywords and adjust your SEO tactics accordingly.
• Run a competitive analysis: Use your data and competitor ranking data (try one of these website traffic checker tools) and identify where you’re outranking competitors and where you need to improve.
• Measure your ROI: Track how your SEO efforts translate into actual visibility and traffic.

When you spot that high-impression, low-CTR pattern, the fix usually isn’t a full content rewrite. I’d start with the title tag and meta description — the two things a searcher actually sees before clicking — and check whether they match what the query implies someone wants.

A page ranking for “how to fix a slow website” that promises a general speed guide but reads like a hosting sales pitch will keep collecting impressions without clicks, no matter how well it ranks.

4 Things Most People Miss Once They Have Keyword Data

Finding the report is the easy part. Here’s where most site owners stop looking, and where the more useful insights actually are.

1. Separating Branded From Non-Branded Searches

Not every query in your report is really about SEO. Branded queries are the ones where someone already knows your business and searches for it by name — your company name, product name, or site name.

Non-branded queries are everything else: broader, topic-based searches from people who don’t know you exist yet.

Lumping the two together makes an SEO strategy look healthier than it actually is. Branded traffic mostly measures how many people already know you — it doesn’t say much about whether your content is reaching new searchers.

Say a dozen of your top 50 queries are variations of your own brand name, and those account for most of your clicks. The rest of the list — the genuinely non-branded terms — is what actually tells you whether your SEO is reaching people who’ve never heard of you.

To separate the two, scan your query list for your brand name and any close misspellings, then set those rows aside. In Search Console specifically, you can add a query filter set to “doesn’t contain” your brand name, which strips branded queries out of the report entirely instead of picking them out by eye.

Branded search volume also tends to spike right after a PR mention, a podcast appearance, or an ad campaign — worth keeping in mind before crediting an SEO change for a jump that was really about visibility somewhere else.

If most of your clicks are branded, that’s a sign to invest more in content built around keywords that reach people who’ve never heard of you. If non-branded traffic dominates but conversions lag, the opposite is usually true: the content is finding people, but nothing after the click is turning them into customers or subscribers.

2. Filtering Out Bot, Spam, and Junk Queries

Not every row in a query report reflects a real person. Search Console and GA4 both pick up a certain amount of bot traffic and spam crawling, mixed in with your legitimate keyword data.

The tell is usually the query itself. Watch for a few patterns:

• Random character strings that don’t form real words
• Queries in a language your content was never written in
• Phrases that don’t read like anything a person would actually type

Impression-to-click ratios can flag it too. A query with thousands of impressions and exactly zero clicks, repeated across dozens of similarly nonsensical terms, points to a bot scanning your listings rather than real search demand.

Search Console doesn’t offer a one-click bot filter, so filtering these out mostly means ignoring them as you scan the table — or excluding them from a spreadsheet export if you’re working with the data that way.

Excluding the obvious junk rows keeps your click-through-rate benchmarks honest. A handful of zero-click junk rows can quietly drag down your average CTR and make legitimate underperforming queries look worse than they actually are.

3. Connecting Keywords to Landing Pages and Conversions

Knowing which keywords rank for your site only answers half the question. The other half is which page each query actually lands on, and whether that page turns visitors into something more.

In Search Console alone, that means jumping between two separate reports by hand: the Queries table to find a keyword, then the Pages report to see which URL it’s tied to.

MonsterInsights shortens that process without merging the two into one report. The Search Keywords Report and the Landing Page Report are still two distinct reports, but both live in the same WordPress dashboard, so you’re not signing into a second tool to check the second half.

Open the Landing Page Report and you’ll see sessions, users, engagement, revenue, purchases, average order value, and conversion rate for each of your top pages.

Revenue and purchase figures only populate once you’ve connected WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads tracking — without that, the report still shows solid traffic and engagement data, just not the sales side.

Cross-referencing that against the query that sent the traffic tells you whether a keyword is worth chasing further or just generating impressions with nothing behind them.

4. Tracking Trends Over Time, Not Just a Snapshot

A single week’s dip or spike in a keyword’s clicks doesn’t tell you much on its own. Search terms move around for reasons that have nothing to do with your content, from a seasonal lull to a broader algorithm update.

Most reporting dashboards that track traffic or keyword trends include some version of a “compare to previous period” control. It lets you set a longer range — say the last 90 days — against the 90 days before it, instead of judging a keyword by a single week.

That longer view is what separates a keyword that’s genuinely losing ground from one that just had a rough week.

FAQs About Google Analytics Keywords

Once you know which keywords are already working for you, the real payoff comes from acting on that data instead of just checking it once. Here are a few guides that go deeper on where to take it next:

• How to Add SEO Keywords to WordPress (The Best Way)
• How to Use Google Search Console for Keyword Research
• How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: Quick-Start Guide
• Best Free Keyword Generator Tools to Master SEO
• Best Ways to Measure SEO Performance in Google Analytics

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