How To Do Keyword Mapping For SEO?

Eager to know what topics have the potential to get your pages ranked? Keyword mapping will be helpful! The objective of this exercise is to find keywords that you can target via your pages. You need to create structured & well-organized content around the targetted keywords to engage users.

In this blog, we’ll guide you through mapping keywords and targeting them in a user-friendly manner.

How Is Keyword Mapping Done?

For efficient keyword mapping, we first need to understand what content clusters are.

Content clusters are a list of sub-topics that can be categorized into broader topics. For example, if you are a digital marketing agency, you will have separate clusters dedicated to the following offerings – SEO Content, Instagram Marketing, Facebook Marketing, YouTube Marketing, Linkedin Marketing, Backlinking, etc. Each cluster will have many topics to cover – ranging from strategies to tools, all down to associated costs.

With this concept now simplified, you must implement 4 steps for result-driven keyword mapping!

1. Create broader clusters

  • Create Seed Keywords — List all your company’s product and service offerings. These will be your seed keywords.
  • Keyword Research — When you fire any one seed keyword on your preferred tool, you will obtain a gigantic list of keywords relevant to that seed keyword.
  • Topics & segregation — The keywords will be your topics, and your topics combined with relevant seed keywords will form your cluster. This step has to be repeated with every seed keyword to generate more clusters.
  • Note — Your cluster sheet will contain topical keywords, but you must conduct additional keyword research to obtain primary/secondary keywords for each topic.

2. Topics categorization

Divide topics in each cluster based on what appeals to users at different stages of the customer journey:

  • Awareness (Informative)
  • Consideration (Commercial)
  • Decision (Transaction)

3. Pages Optimization

Your keyword analysis shall focus on the following aspects:

  • Which keywords need to be targeted via new pages or existing pages?
  • Which keywords must be used for landing pages, service pages, category pages, or blogs?
  • In what order to prioritize them – which will depend on competitors’ analysis

4. Competition Analysis

Look at what factors give you a competitive edge for a given keyword.

  • DR (Domain Rate)
  • Content Depth & Relevance of Ranking Competitors
  • Your expertise & experience credentials – That satisfies EEAT algorithms.

Let’s Unpack – Why Keyword Mapping?

Keyword Mapping Scope

Keyword mapping is identifying what keywords you will target and documenting your decision concerning each.

Keyword mapping serves as a solution for both these dilemmas:

  • You need more ideas on what topics you can create pages, or whether to target new ideas/concepts through new pages or existing pages.
  • You have found keywords you haven’t targeted via your website, but you are sure your website has closely matching pages.

What are the Benefits of Keyword Mapping in SEO?

Keyword mapping is a crucial part of search engine optimization (SEO). It highlights which pages are linked with what keywords, where your site ranks, and where there’s scope to improve further so that you can enhance website visibility.

1. Provides A Vision For Your Website Structure

  • What topics will new pages target
  • What these topical pages would discuss
  • How to include keywords in the existing pages

2. Helps In Internal Linking Pages Depending On Relevance

  • Keyword mapping will detail all the keywords you have targetted or are yet to target, allowing you to assess what pages cover similar intent.
  • You can substitute anchor texts of internal links with the keywords listed in your map.

3. Helps In Analyzing Website’s Performance

  • Tracking – Keyword mapping helps you track all important search queries for which you wish to optimize your pages. With adequately researched keywords and assigned pages, it is much easier to have a brief overview of your website’s performance.
  • Avoiding Cannibalization – When you target the same keyword through two different pages, one of them doesn’t allow the other page to rank. Keyword mapping reduces the possibility of keyword cannibalization.

Ideal template for Keyword Mapping

Each cluster will have a unique keyword mapping sheet. Your template should be designed in such a way that you can regularly record and analyze progress on each topic. Your template for each cluster should detail the following aspects.

  • Topic Keyword & Search Volume: This would cover your page topic and its volume to know the traffic potential.
  • Page Type assigned to each topic: Blog, Landing Pages, Service Pages, Category Pages, etc.
  • Action: Whether you will create a new page to target the said topic, or modify existing pages.
  • Progress: To tell whether the page has been published, is under progress, or is untouched.
  • Indexed status: To know if Google crawl bots have scanned your page.
  • SEO efforts: Rows within this column could highlight efforts taken, such as – Social media syndication, Social bookmarking, Internal linking, Content/format updates, or Outbound links.
  • Resource: To know which team member is working on the said topic.
  • Rank Tracking: To know what pages are ranking and where there’s scope for further optimizations.
  • Date of Publish: This date will convey when the blog was uploaded.
  • Latest Update: This date will give a gist of when someone last worked on your page.
  • Monthly Engagement: This column will cover clicks and impressions on published pages. You will optimize pages with low CTRs or low rankings against high search volume.

How To Avoid Keyword Cannibalization?

You don’t want multiple pages on your website to target the same keywords. If you want to increase the efficiency of SEO strategies, you must avoid keyword cannibalization at all costs. Let’s examine how to avoid keyword cannibalization.

Method 1 – Shortcode:

  • On the URL bar, type [site:(domain URL) “keyword”]. This will help you find all the web pages that use your targeted keywords.
  • For example, the shortcode for our website will be [site:https://promodome.in/ ‘SEO”].
  • The limitation of this method is that only indexed pages will show up, not non-indexed pages.

Method 2 – Google Analytics:

  • Log in to your Google Analytics account.
  • Head over to the ‘behavior’ section and then click ‘site content.’
  • Click on ‘all pages.’
  • When you get a list of all pages, you will know which page targets which keyword or is repetitive.

Keyword Mapping Tools

We have gathered a few tools to assist you with keyword mapping. They will ensure the accuracy of your content strategy.

1. Google Ads Keyword Planner:

  • Search “Google Adwords” in the Google search bar, click on the keyword planner, and head to the “tools & settings” menu.
  • Locate the “planning” section and select “keyword planner.”
  • Choose the “Start with Keywords” option, fire a seed keyword, and conduct your research.

2. Semrush/Ahrefs/MozBar:

  • Visit the “Keyword Manager” tool on Semrush.
  • Fire a seed keyword and obtain a list of all LSIs and relevant queries.

We have restricted our research to just a few tools, but businesses have more options to explore, especially if they consult experts.

Conclusion – Is Keyword Mapping Beneficial?

In short, Keyword mapping entails identifying potential keywords to target, planning how to target them, and meticulously recording progress & relevant metrics to ensure that your pages are performing well. We have also suggested SEO practices to improve the efficiency of your strategy.

Also consider this: Good website development is strongly interrelated with SEO gains, so always invest in it.

Author avatar
Samruddhi
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