A Guide To Keyword Mapping In SEO

A Guide To Keyword Mapping In SEO. When you’re working from home, you often end up in a loop of urgent work. You won’t get time to evaluate your strategy and create objectives for your site. In this piece, you’ll learn how to develop a case that will give you some strategy time by showing its long-term value, and how to maximize the advantages of keyword mapping in your SEO strategy.

WHAT EXACTLY IS KEYWORD MAPPING AND WHAT MAKES IT SO IMPORTANT?

Keyword mapping is the process of combining your target keywords to their objective landing pages.

The main advantages of keyword mapping are:

• A well-informed internal linking strategy
• You can easily measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts
• Options for more persuasive reporting
• You’ll be able to notice and react quickly when things are bad

So what are you looking to achieve? You must want to rank with the right pages against the right keywords at the bottom of the funnel.

A DETAILED GUIDE TO KEYWORD MAPPING

Now that we get to know why we desire to do this exercise and what we’re planning to achieve, let’s check the “how”.

Use this piece as an orientation. Considering the maturity of your website and your SEO works on it so far, a few steps might not make sense to you.

Quite naturally, you know your website best, so you should be more confident in the choices that you’re making and use this guide according to your needs.

STEP 1: Find Your Top Performing Pages

For this step, we’ll use organic performance metrics using Google Analytics, however, if your site is small or new, you might want to use your PPC data or, just quite simply, your best understanding judgment.

• Visit Google Analytics to access Behavior -> Site content -> Landing pages. Use a date range that you require. You can opt for 12 months to remove seasonality effects.
• You should apply an audience segment to get organic traffic. If you’re planning to target some specific countries, you have to edit the audience segment to add only your target countries.
• Select your main goal, especially the one you will use for reporting and exporting the report. If you have more than one goal, then you’ll have to export it more than once and consolidate them into a single report.
• You should arrange the document to view Page, Sessions, Conversions, and Conversion Rate.
• Remove all those URLs that aren’t known as “money pages”. They are actually testimonials, blog posts that don’t generate conversions, T&Cs. You should use your knowledge about your company to remove such pages that are not important for the business and you’re not concerned about ranking.

You have all the information that you need to select what your main landing pages are. Use this report to choose a selection of your 20 most important pages. Make sure this number makes sense for you. Because you may be only aiming to rank for five pages at this moment.

STEP 2: Discover Your Seed Keywords

Finding the seed keyword that you want to rank for with every page should be very intuitive as there is a high chance to be in the URL.

In case you’re finding hesitation between keywords, you have the option to inform your decision by checking a few sources:

• You should consult Google Search Console to discover your top-performing queries for your best-performing pages.
• Use the keyword research tool that you’re comfortable with to compare volume, difficulty, and intent.
• Make use of PPC data.

You may want to find a nice balance between volume, difficulty, and conversions.

STEP 3: Enlarge Your Seed Keywords 

You should have a quick approach to keyword research. This will help you to map, target, and track the keywords that generate the highest value to the business. You should optimize for the bottom of the funnel.

A few of the sources of information that you can use here are:

• Your search terms report present on the Google Ads.
• The keywords on these pages that are ranking for as shown on the Google Search Console.
• The keyword research tools are present on Ahrefs and SEMrush. You have the option to use the sections for “phrase match” and “having the same terms”.

Next you have to narrow down your findings in around 10 keywords and keyword variations as per the page. Understand this using volume, keyword difficulty, and your market knowledge.

Look at the search engine result pages for these keywords and you should ask yourself the following questions:

• What kind of user intent is Google assuming?
• Are my competitors also using these keywords for ranking?
• Is the page ad-heavy? If it is so, then it should have high commercial value.

STEP 4: Develop Your Keyword Map

It is really up to you what your keyword map is going to look like. 

Now you should replicate the setup on your preferred rank tracker. You should use your seed keyword for each and every group as a tag for the group.

If you are able to tag your keywords effectively, it will allow you to see very easily what type of keyword groups are growing and dropping, and which ones have over one landing page ranking for them. This could indicate that there are some issues known as cannibalization on your site. 

If you don’t know where to start, here are some favorite rank trackers: SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SEOmonitor. 

STEP 5: Design An On-page Optimization Roadmap

There are various issues or opportunities that you might have faced during this exercise. Each issue or opportunity will be unique to your site; however, here are some most common ones! 

• Missing content. During the exercise, you might have discovered you were missing a particular page for one of your seed keywords. The best idea is to create a page.
• Contents that aren’t ranking. This might happen because of different issues and will have several different fixes. Some actions you can take care of are the following: ensure there are no technical issues stopping the page from ranking like inclusion on the robots.txt file, a bad noindex tag, not good HTTP responses, or a poor page experience. You should review the content to ensure it’s actually relevant. Then you should discover internal linking opportunities present on your content, on the footer or menu. You should also check what your competitors are doing and do it on a better way. 

There are several pages that are targeting the same query. There is one solution that you should merge into one page that will offer the users the best. Alternatively, you have the option to choose to edit the content of one of the pages that cater to a more long-tail version of that query.

We hope this guide helps you, and you’ve discovered valuable optimization opportunities, along with a better way to report on the value of your work.