How to Do Keyword Mapping: Effective Guide

Keyword mapping is a vital aspect of optimizing your website. It lets you quickly identify keywords relevant to your business and determine where they go on your website.

This process results in an organized website that ranks high in SERPs and gives your audience the kind of content they’re looking for. How to do keyword mapping? Read on to find out!

A keyword map helps keep your website organized and prevents duplicate content and keyword cannibalization. It also allows you to identify keyword gaps and new content opportunities.

Keyword maps make for easy communication of your expectations to members of your content team. Such that their attention will be focused on those goals. This guide discusses how to do keyword mapping for your website.

What Is Keyword Mapping?

Keyword mapping is the process of assigning keywords to the relevant pages on your website. It involves linking target keywords to the pages associated with them. Keyword mapping allows you to create a logical website structure, develop better content, and understand your website’s organic strategy.

A keyword mapping deliverable can disclose important detail of your website. It helps you better understand your website structure and detect optimization priorities. Every SEO strategy must begin with and include a keyword mapping strategy.

Benefits of Keyword Mapping

Effective keyword mapping helps inform your SEO strategy. Mapping enables you to see what you are ranking for and what you need to do to improve your traffic. Some of the benefits of keyword mapping include the following:

1. Identify Keyword Gaps

If your content strategy targets the right keywords, your website’s ranking on Google will improve significantly. Your overall capacity to be found by your target customer will also improve.

Keyword mapping helps you establish where you’re ranking for your target keywords. It also enables you to identify the head terms you’re not ranking for or those you’re poorly ranking for. This way, you target these keyword gaps with relevant pages. The knowledge of keyword gaps is vital to improving your content strategy and facilitating the optimization of existing content for underperforming keywords.

2. Find Keyword Overlap & Duplicates

When different pages on your website target the same keywords, keyword cannibalization and duplicate content issues arise. Google penalizes websites with duplicate content and ranks them lower than those with unique content. Keyword cannibalization can negatively impact your organic traffic, so you must eliminate duplicate content on your website. 

Keyword mapping helps you find those parts of your website that make your keyword strategy redundant. It enables you to identify keyword overlap between your web pages. This way, you can merge two pages that rank for the same keywords into one to improve your organic traffic.

3. Streamline Internal Linking

A solid internal linking structure is important for a website. It helps users navigate your website easily, channels authority to neglected pages, and allows search engine bots to understand your website’s overall design better. With properly organized keywords and effective mapping to relevant web pages, you’ll be able to organize your internal link-building effectively. And bring related pages together by appropriately interlinking the latest content with old ones.

4. Communicate Better With Content Development Team

A well-organized keyword database for your website’s pages allows for smooth liaisons with other departments. A keyword map can convey the goals and expectations of your website to your content development team. The map serves as a model for each page, detailing the most vital keywords that need to be accentuated.

How to Do Keyword Mapping

1. Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first step to keyword mapping. With keyword research, you can identify all the keywords you already rank for and find new keyword ideas. Keyword research tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs can help you do this easily.

Consider search volume and keyword difficulty when compiling your keyword list. Your keyword list should include variations of the main keyword as well as valuable long-tail keywords. These keywords are more specific and targeted, have a narrower search intent, and have a low competition level. Explore relevant keywords, and add them to a spreadsheet.

2. Group Keywords

Group keywords that target the same topic together, including variations of these keywords. Think about the keywords your audience might be using to find your product, service, or content. Take note of subtopics, variations, and synonyms of your primary keyword. This ensures that your content attracts different audiences to your website. For example, variations of the search term “keyword research tool” may include 

• “Keyword research software”
• “Software for keyword research” or 
• “Tool for keyword research.” 

Next, consider the search intent of these keywords.

Someone searching for the best keyword research tool may be looking for the best tool to purchase. So they’re likely in the middle of the purchase funnel. However, someone searching for “what is keyword research tool” is most likely at the top of the purchase funnel. And only needs information on keyword research tools.

Put keywords with similar search intent into the same group to create targeted content based on the needs of your audience.

Google classifies keywords search intent into four types. 

Informational Search Intent

These search terms are used to find information or answers to questions. They cover how, what, where, when and who questions. For example: 

• How to do keyword mapping.
• Who is the President of America?
• What is SEO?
• Where is Cyprus located?
• When is America’s independence?

Navigational Search Intent

Navigational searchers want to find a particular website or geographical location. Users would typically initiate a search for a website rather than typing in the website URL on Google. Such search queries are website names. For example, YouTube, INKforAll, and Twitter.

Commercial Search Intent

Commercial search queries focus on narrowing down products for purchase. Searchers want to purchase a product but are unsure which specific product to buy. They’re still researching options, comparing prices, features and offers to find a suitable choice. Commercial search queries often include modifiers like top, best, review. For example, “best pizza restaurant,” “Hp laptop review.”

Transactional Search Intent

Transactional searches indicate a user’s readiness to make a purchase. Searchers are committed to making a purchase; they’re just looking for where to buy specific products. Transactional search queries include brand names and specific products. For example, “buy Hp laptop” and “running shoes for sale.”

3. Use a Spreadsheet to Plan Your SEO Strategy

Once you have a list of valuable keywords, you’ll want to use them to visualize the structure of website pages. The idea is to have main pages and subtopic pages that explore the main topic in detail. Your website structure should follow, thus: your page URL, topic, and sub-topic. This structure signals to search engines how your content is structured around topics.

You also need to augment the SEO elements for all your pages. This will keep expectations aligned and minimize misinterpretations when the content is created. 

Plan your SEO strategy for each page using a spreadsheet. This will serve as a roadmap for your content strategy. It will ensure that the content you create properly mirrors what has been conceived. Your spreadsheet should include the following:

• Page URL and target keywords
• Proposed or existing page title
• Existing or proposed H1 tag
• Existing or proposed meta description

Now that you’ve got your keyword map, you’ll want to create content accordingly. This is when you’ll get the hang of your efforts and understand why the whole process is essential to your SEO success.

Conclusion

Keywords are at the heart of digital marketing campaigns. Keyword mapping is a valuable tool for guiding your marketing strategy. It helps you maintain and convey an accurate view of the state of your website in organic search and how it can be improved.

Keyword maps help you create an organized website, leading to proper content planning, internal linking, on-page optimization, and tracking.

Now that you know the importance of keyword mapping and how to structure your website, it’s time to start.