The keyword mapping guide provides comprehensive information, encompassing both the definition and practical advice on accurately mapping terms. Keyword mapping is a valuable tool for effectively organizing keywords and pages. This solution resolves SEO concerns and enhances your website by using numerous fresh keywords. With careful strategic planning, it is possible to get a substantial amount of supplementary free traffic that would otherwise be overlooked. Now, let’s begin.
What Is Keyword Mapping in SEO?
Keyword mapping is a systematic procedure that involves the allocation of keywords to their corresponding pages within a website. Through meticulous preparation, you will establish a correlation between keywords and URLs, which will then be organized into relevant clusters. Collectively, they assist in maintaining the organization and optimization of all the material on your website.
For example, you have previously gathered the essential keywords you wish to achieve a high ranking for, and now you own a compilation of keywords and a compilation of web pages. Next, you must combine those two elements. This is precisely the definition of a keyword map. Essentially, it is a vast spreadsheet that is organized into columns, allowing you to easily organize and control your keywords and pages. Keyword mapping is an essential initial step in your SEO plan to effectively utilize your optimization efforts.
What Is The Significance Of Keyword Mapping?
Having established a foundational understanding of keyword mapping, it is imperative to examine the significance of this practice for SEO professionals and website proprietors. In broad terms, the practice of SEO keyword mapping can contribute to the enhancement of one’s content strategy through the following means:
Prevent Keyword Overlap
When employing a strategy of targeting identical keywords across numerous pages, it is possible for distinct URLs to vie for identical ranks. Furthermore, the presence of similar terms across multiple pages can result in whole or partial duplication, which is undesirable for any website. Keyword mapping facilitates the efficient allocation of keywords to distinct target sites, ensuring that they do not contradict each other.
Discover Content Opportunities
A website’s ranking may be negatively impacted if the selected digital marketing plan fails to encompass all the essential keywords. Keyword mapping facilitates the identification of absent keywords and enables the targeting of these keywords with pertinent pages, or the creation of new ones.
Analyze Online Performance
A keyword map provides a comprehensive perspective on the performance of your webpages. Not only can you view the ranking of each page, but you can also view the specific keywords for which it is expected to rank.
Prioritize Optimization Efforts
There exists a distinction between pages and keywords. By consolidating all data in a centralized location, displaying pages based on their keywords, and including SEO statistics, you can effectively prioritize your efforts. An effective keyword map will identify the areas that require immediate optimization and those that can be deferred.
Optimize Internal Connectivity
The good organization and mapping of keywords to their respective web pages enables the efficient organization of internal link development, facilitating the consolidation of relevant material. This type of linking solidifies the structure of the website, enhances the user experience, and improves several other elements that are advantageous for rankings.
Over time, the implementation of a consistent and ongoing keyword mapping procedure will facilitate the monitoring of search engine optimization (SEO) advancements and the identification of deficiencies within the existing keyword strategy.
Choose The Right Keyword Mapping Tools To Manage Keywords Effectively
The market offers a wide range of keyword mapping solutions that are specifically designed for tasks such as content mapping and website URL mapping. One has the option to manually associate keywords with pages using either Google Sheets or traditional Excel. However, the process may be excessively time-consuming when dealing with a list of hundreds of keywords.
Rank Market offers group buy SEO PowerSuite, granting access to powerful SEO tools at a fraction of the individual cost. With Rank Market’s group buy option, users can harness the full potential of SEO PowerSuite’s suite of tools to elevate their digital marketing strategies efficiently and affordably.
Keyword Mapping in SEO
Step 1: Assessing Your Current Keyword Rankings
The keyword mapping process begins with proper keyword research, and the first thing to do is to identify all the keywords you are currently ranking for. You can check the keywords that have been driving organic traffic to your site using Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Step 2. Searching for New Keywords to Develop Your Content Plan
Next is thorough keyword research: you need to identify new keywords that your website isn’t currently ranking for but are valuable to add to your SEO strategy.
You can access Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and input some broad industry-defining terms.
For example, if you sell coffee equipment online, you might input:
coffee
espresso
cappuccino
french press
percolator
From there, proceed to the Matching Terms report. This shows you all the keywords in our database containing one or more of your seed terms. In this case, over four million keywords:
Then, you can further narrow down this report using filters.
For instance, if you want less competitive keywords, try filtering keywords with:
– Low KD scores. The top-ranking pages for these keywords have few or no backlinks, so you won’t need many backlinks to rank.
– Low DR websites in the top 5. If these pages are ranking, you don’t need to be a big brand to rank.
Step 3: Evaluating the Search Intent of Your Keywords
Search intent is a crucial component of landing page optimization: to help a page rank faster, it must target a specific purpose behind the query.
There are several types of keyword search intent, but focus on three main types corresponding to the stages of the customer journey in the marketing tunnel:
Informational – these keywords are used to seek information, explore a topic: examples include “what is SEO CTR,” “how to increase conversion rates,” etc. Informational keywords are likely to trigger blog posts, guides, and tutorials.
Commercial investigation – keywords like these are used to search and compare products, evaluated or listed, such as “Rank Tracker reviews,” “keyword mapping tools 2023,” “Excel vs Google Sheets,” etc. Investigation terms are perfect for product listings and reviews.
Transactional – these keywords indicate the user’s readiness to make a purchase: “buy discounted Rank Tracker,” “keyword mapping templates,” “Notion tool templates for sale.” Transactional queries will best match product pages.
However, intent isn’t always as clear-cut as it may seem at first glance. There may be cases where Google suggests different search results for keywords seemingly belonging to the same group, even when a keyword differs only by singular or plural form.
Step 4: Utilizing Keyword Mapping to Analyze SEO Potential
Once you’ve identified a topic you want to cover, record it in your keyword map template along with the Keyword Difficulty (KD) and Traffic Potential (TP) scores. You can find these by examining the data for the Topic in the Keyword Explorer.
If you already have a page on that topic, add its URL to the “URL” column. If not, leave the column blank. If you’re unsure which topic is most suitable, prioritize those with traffic and business potential.
A topic has traffic potential if top-ranking pages receive traffic. You can verify this by checking the Traffic Potential (TP) metrics for the Parent Topic in the Keyword Explorer. This is an estimate of traffic to the current top-ranking page.
For example, the TP for “best coffee maker” is 28K:
A topic has business potential if the traffic has the potential to generate revenue for your business.
This is relative. It depends on what searchers are looking for and what your business does.
For instance, searchers for “best coffee maker” are seeking recommendations. You can identify this because that’s what’s ranking.
If you have a coffee affiliate website, this is a high business potential topic because you can earn commissions from recommendations. If you roast and sell your own coffee online, the business potential will be lower because it’s challenging to “sell” your product within content.
Utilizing Keyword Mapping To Optimize Content
WebSite Auditor is an additional mapping tool included in the SEO PowerSuite bundle. It serves as more than a mere site audit tool; it aids in identifying technological problems and, in addition, enhances content optimization with greater efficiency. Keyword Mapping in WebSite Auditor assists website editors in strategizing content, examining the search engine results pages (SERPs), and enhancing landing pages to maximize their search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities. The process of content mapping can be initiated by utilizing the keywords that have been previously gathered in Rank Tracker.
Step 5. Import Your Keywords into WebSite Auditor
WebSite Auditor is necessary for this phase. It is currently available for free download.
To initiate a project in WebSite Auditor, input the URLs of your website. Next, navigate to the Page Audit section and select the “Import from Rank Tracker” option to incorporate all the identified keywords. While it is possible to manually input the keywords, it is more efficient to import them from a CSV file or a project.
Currently, all the identified keywords are documented in the Keyword Map of WebSite Auditor within the Page Audit module. Furthermore, the phrases that have already been allocated to a landing page will be designated as “Mapped.” Subsequently, it is possible to allocate the remaining unassigned keywords to the remaining pages or devise a strategy to incorporate additional ones.
Step 6. Associate Keywords With Corresponding Content
It is now time to proceed with the content mapping process. Click on any phrase in the Keyword Map of the WebSite Auditor. The tool will autonomously propose the pertinent webpages to associate with this term.
The WebSite Auditor assesses the significance of a webpage by considering the inclusion of a keyword in the URL, the title, and the existing ranking of the page for other keywords.
Typically, a set of five recommended pages is provided, necessitating a human evaluation process to identify the most suitable option.
The software displays many parameters that can assist you in identifying the most suitable URL that matches your term. This analysis will evaluate the metrics associated with each item in the left-hand panel of the workspace.
- The cumulative organic traffic generated by the page through the ranking keywords throughout the previous month.
- If there are any mapped keywords.
- Additional ranking keywords that should be in close proximity to your primary keyword.
- The present Google Rank and the corresponding traffic generated by each keyword on the webpage.
- Assess the search volume and difficulty associated with each keyword.
- The quantity of domains that associate with the webpage and the overall InLink Rank.
It is evident that the initial recommended page includes the term in both the title and URL, and it already holds a ranking for this particular keyword. Therefore, it is a match. To assign the keyword to the page, simply click on the green Map button located in close proximity to the relevant URL. It is advisable to adhere to the guideline of “one keyword per one landing page.
A webpage has the potential to accommodate several search queries, hence enabling the matching of a landing page with multiple keywords. However, it is important to note that a keyword can only be associated with a single landing page at any one moment.
There is a possibility that a single keyword has been erroneously associated with multiple sites. This might occur, for instance, when mapping a keyword in Rank Tracker and subsequently importing the project into WebSite Auditor, where the term was also mapped to a different URL. Fortunately, WebSite Auditor has the capability to automatically indicate the presence of many pages associated with a single term.
Therefore, you can readily examine the cause of this occurrence and remove the page that is not pertinent. In the absence of conflicting pages, there is a risk of keyword cannibalization, which can result in the loss of organic traffic. Prevent it from occurring!
Determining the immediate relevance of some URLs can provide a challenge. Once more, it is imperative to comprehend the search intent in order to acquire insight into the intended content. Occasionally, it may be necessary to navigate to the webpage and verify its contents. However, at this juncture, we can employ WebSite Auditor to go deeper into the content’s optimization level.
Step 7. Examine Your Content for The Mapped Keywords
It is evident that certain URLs generate optimization scores, which I have already verified to determine their optimization rate. If the score is indicated as N/A, request WebSite Auditor to do an analysis of the page’s content. To access the Content Audit module, simply click on the bar graph located in the upper left corner of the workspace.
The optimization of the URL for your keywords can be observed in that location. The forthcoming examination will encompass the primary SEO elements, encompassing the utilization of keywords in titles, meta descriptions, headings, alt texts, and other relevant components.
Additionally, you will encounter recommendations or cautions, as well as a table displaying these aspects and their utilization by your SERP rivals.
Step 8: Address Any Deficiencies in Content or Keywords
After successfully aligning keywords and pages, you will get a combination of keywords without pages and pages without any associated keywords.
If it is revealed that a very effective term lacks support from any of your current webpages, it is highly commendable. By including more pages into your website, you can seize possibilities to achieve higher rankings for novel and distinct keywords. By increasing the number of crawlable URLs in your index, you enhance your overall rankings and offer a valuable resource for your users.
To build a new page for the studied term, click on the Plus button at the top of the term Map. Enter the new URL and keyword, and the item will be automatically produced.
Reminder: Inclusion of Additional Pages in Keyword Map
If the new URL has not yet been published, it will be indicated with a 404 header response in the keyword map.
Conversely, if you encounter specific pages in your map that do not align with any specific terms, it is recommended to revisit Rank Tracker and identify other keywords that are relevant.
However, the problem may not be related to your keyword research. For instance, it is likely that your company’s pages such as “About us” and others would have minimal or no keywords to focus on, which is completely fine.
Step 9. Enhance Your Content to Effectively Utilize The Mapped Keywords
Ultimately, the material Editor can be utilized to forward the process of optimizing the material. The recommendations for optimization are derived from an examination of the pages that rank highest for the selected keywords. The tool will provide recommendations for the most effective word count for the page, the amount and quantity of keywords to include, and the themes to address. The system will identify optimization alerts, such as the incomplete presence of alt texts for images or the lack of keywords in the title and/or meta descriptions.
Editing the page’s content can be initiated directly within the tool. As you modify your text, you will observe an enhancement in the optimization rate. In an alternative approach, the recommendations can be exported in the form of a PDF file and thereafter forwarded to copywriters as a job.
Step 10. Manage Your Activities in a Visual Content Map
Lastly, in our keyword mapping tutorial, we will provide instructions on how to obtain a comprehensive overview of your keyword map. Naturally, the process of mapping content can be accomplished using spreadsheets, tables with rows and columns, and customized with desired colors and markings. However, a more sophisticated approach to managing all pages can be achieved through the utilization of a visual sitemap.
The utilization of a visible content map facilitates the evaluation of the content plan, site reconstruction, content pruning, and various other tasks. By utilizing the content map, you may pinpoint specific locations on your website where to strategically position keywords or develop new articles, categories, and other relevant content.
To access the visualization area in WebSite Auditor, navigate to the Site Structure section.
Here, you will promptly comprehend the overall structure of your website, including the dimensions of the home page, the categories, and the number of incoming and outgoing links associated with each URL.
The tool facilitates rapid switching of visualizations for several significant elements:
- The click depth of a page indicates the number of steps required for a user or Googlebot to navigate from your homepage to reach it. There exists a correlation between the hierarchy of pages and their rankings, whereby sites that are closer to the homepage tend to rank higher for more keywords and receive a greater number of visits. Therefore, it might be prudent to incorporate more challenging keywords on these webpages.
- Internal PageRank is a measure that has resemblance to Google’s PageRank, serving as an indicator of the significance of a webpage. Typically, sites that are closer to the homepage tend to have a higher number of external links and internal link juice.
- Pageviews, as measured by Google Analytics, indicate the number of views a page has received within the past month.
The visual sitemap facilitates the documentation of content development strategies, encompassing tasks such as generating new pages and establishing connections to optimal destinations. Additionally, you have the option to consolidate URLs and eliminate irrelevant or outdated ones by implementing redirects as needed.
Rank Market offers group buy Ahrefs, providing access to powerful SEO tools at a fraction of the individual cost. Join our group buy to unlock Ahrefs’ suite of features and elevate your digital marketing efforts today.
Sum Up
Developing a keyword map is a challenging task. Furthermore, the process of keyword mapping is continuous and should not be seen as a one-time task that is then neglected. The process is arduous and perpetual, yet gratifying, since a well-designed keyword map will promptly expose the vulnerabilities of your content strategy and assist you in eliminating them.
