Content marketing without a well-crafted content strategy is similar to cooking a meal without a recipe. However, a B2B content marketing study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute in 2022 revealed that only 40% of marketers have a documented content strategy.
This indicates a huge gap that your business can take great advantage of! But how? You can do it by developing a proper plan for your website’s content, of course!
With more than 68% of online search experiences beginning with a search engine, optimizing your website’s content for user search intent is essential for content marketing success in today’s digitally driven world. In fact, 48.7% of marketers state that organic search is expected to bring the maximum return on investment for their businesses.
This is where foundational SEO strategies like keyword mapping come in. A well-researched and regularly optimized keyword research strategy can be all the difference between an ineffective and a successful content marketing plan. Additionally, understanding the importance of backlink relevance can further enhance your SEO efforts by ensuring that your inbound links are contextually appropriate and supportive of your keyword strategy.
This blog will provide you with a basic overview of keyword mapping and why it is important. We will also discuss how you can create a robust keyword mapping strategy, what challenges you may face in this endeavour, and the best practices you can follow to overcome them. Ready to dive in? Let’s get started!
What is Keyword Mapping?
Keyword mapping is an SEO technique that strategically groups target keywords, allocates them to your website's pages, and records your choices in a keyword map.
Once you identify suitable keyword suggestions using a keyword research tool, you can use a spreadsheet to create your keyword map or matrix.
The objective is to associate each keyword with the web page (and URL), closely matching the user’s search intent or what they are trying to find.
Why? This is because the web page will attain the best potential of appearing prominently in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Find keyword suggestions now:
Why is Keyword Mapping Important?
Keyword mapping is crucial to SEO because it allows you to optimize your website's content and structure and maximize the potential of all the keywords that your website ranks for on Google, Bing, or any other SERPs.
Furthermore, any search engine may have trouble determining which web page result best suits the user’s search intent if it discovers the keyword on several pages with a similar function (i.e., duplicate or nearly duplicate pages). This problem may result in keyword cannibalization, lowering your ranking potential.
Mapping keywords to the most relevant pages on your website can be beneficial in several ways, including (but not limited to):
- Creating a well-informed internal linking strategy
- Planning your site’s content strategy
- Measuring the efforts of your SEO activities easily
- Identifying and filling content gaps on your site
- Preventing keyword cannibalization
- Recording and monitoring each of your web page’s metadata
In short, keyword mapping can enable search engines to crawl your website more effectively, keep your site organized, prevent similar web pages from competing in organic search, and bridge the gap between keyword research and on-page SEO.
Now that you understand the basics of keyword mapping and why it matters, let’s check out the steps to create a keyword mapping strategy.
How To Create a Keyword Mapping Strategy?
While creating a keyword map is simple, it can take some time upfront, especially if you are working with a big site.
To do it right, you can use the following step-by-step guide as a template for keyword mapping.
1. Conduct Keyword Research
Successful keyword mapping starts with thorough keyword research. It involves identifying keywords relevant to your audience and industry. You can begin by finding one seed keyword (or the primary keyword) for every web page on your site and then using that as a guiding point for finding other secondary relevant keywords.
Like you use market research tools to understand your competitors and target audience, you can use various keyword research tools to start researching the keywords you can target.
While this step may have entailed some guesswork earlier, you can easily conduct keyword research now using one of the many keyword index tools available in the market. Leveraging such a tool can help you find high-volume and low-competition keywords that you can target to rank your website quickly and easily on SERPs.
For instance, to find some low-competition keywords to rank your site, you can try filtering your keywords based on low KD scores (pages ranking for these keywords have few to no backlinks) or low DR sites (if the DR score of top-ranking sites is less than 30, your brand does not have to be big to rank for such keywords).
If you are struggling to choose a seed keyword, you can either go to Google Search Console and check out which keywords your website is already ranking for or look at which keywords your competitors are using to rank their sites and get inspired!
2. Create Keyword Clusters
Once you have identified relevant keywords, you must cluster similar ones into broader topics based on user search intent. This is called keyword clustering, which can greatly streamline your keyword mapping strategy.
If your keywords fall under the same broader topic and serve the same search intent, you can map them to the same web page URL and target them together.For example, if you were to map keywords for a website selling email marketing software, you could group phrases such as "email marketing software," "best email marketing software," and "email marketing tools" together since users may use any of the listed keywords to find what they are looking for.
Furthermore, clarifying intent goes a long way toward filtering out irrelevant, low-volume, or overly competitive keywords. It ensures that you designate your pages clearly for certain search situations and that those do not infringe upon each other, thus preventing instances of thin or duplicate content and even keyword cannibalization.
3. Build Your Keyword Map
Following keyword research and clustering, it is time to build your keyword map.
While creating your keyword map by hand with a pen and paper is still an option, using a spreadsheet is far more convenient. With a spreadsheet, you can digitally back up all of your data and have greater flexibility with organizing, modifying, and filtering it as needed. Adding information, such as the URL list you'll create in the following step, is also easier when your data is organized into a spreadsheet.
When mapping keywords in your spreadsheet, you must ensure each keyword is assigned to the proper web page. Your keyword mapping spreadsheet should contain the following:
- Primary keyword
- Secondary keywords
- Keyword search volume
- Keyword difficulty
- Keyword search intent
- Competitor keywords
You should also include extra columns for any additional customized content needs.
If you are not confident about the potential of the keywords you have identified and clustered for ranking your site, you can always use a keyword analysis tool. For instance, the Bulk SEO tools from Marketing Miner can conduct bulk keyword analysis for search volume, categorization, keyword difficulty, SERP position, related search, and more.
4. Assign Keywords To URLs
In this step, you assign each keyword cluster to a website page. Every page should focus on different keywords to prevent internal competition. If there are any content gaps and no page meets the search intent, you can add new web pages with the relevant content to meet user search.
Give each new page a major and secondary keyword organically included in the text. Furthermore, make sure to update whether you need to "optimize" or "create" the web page you are assigning your keyword cluster to in the "Status" column of your keyword mapping spreadsheet.
Continue until you have added all the priority-identified pillar pages and subpages to your site. That’s it! Your keyword map is ready and optimized to help your website perform its best on Google, Bing, or any other SERPs.
5. Optimize and Maintain Your Keyword Map
Maintaining a successful and current SEO strategy requires regular optimization of your keyword map. This entails updating your keyword map frequently, improving content, and monitoring keyword performance to adjust to shifting search trends.
Here are some excellent keyword map optimization and maintenance strategies:
- Enhance the content on your current pages through the organic integration of primary and secondary keywords.
- Use on-page SEO strategies, such as body content, H1 tags, meta descriptions, and title tag optimization.
- Ensure your site's content is valuable, relevant, and aligned with user search intent.
- Identify internal linking opportunities on your menu, content, or footer.
- Verify there are no technical problems, such as inclusion in the robots.txt file, a rogue noindex tag, incorrect HTTP replies, or a subpar user experience.
- Check what competitors are doing (such as their ranking keywords and on-page tactics).
- Track keyword performance and frequently research new keywords to identify new opportunities and adapt to new search trends.
- Utilize referral tools and focus on building brand loyalty to improve organic reach and engagement.
Following these steps can help you create a robust keyword map aligned with search trends. However, building a keyword map that ranks your website is challenging. Below are highlighted some common challenges associated with keyword mapping.
Common Challenges in Keyword Mapping
Here are some of the common challenges you may face in creating your keyword map, along with the solutions you can implement to overcome them:
1. Content Gaps Optimization
Content gaps appear when you have relevant keywords for your audience or industry that you must include on your site to rank it but no related page to assign them to.
Solution: You can use keyword index tools to find relevant keywords your present pages need to target to fill in content gaps. Once you have them, publish new web pages or blog articles to assign those keywords. This will lead to your website content complying with user search intent, thus ranking your site higher on SERPs. To find and close any potential content gaps that may arise, regularly check your keyword map and content plan.
2. Keyword Cannibalization
When several pages on your website compete for the same keyword, it results in keyword cannibalization, which hurts your site's ability to rank well internally.
Solution: Audit your keyword map and website content frequently to avoid keyword cannibalization. Use tools like Marketing Miner to find overlapping keywords and pages. Combine related information onto one page and make sure every page focuses on a different set of keywords. This will prevent multiple pages on your site from competing for similar search queries. To ensure ideal keyword targeting, ensure regular updation of your keyword map.
3. Maintaining Relevancy Over Time
Search trends and user behaviour tend to shift over time, decreasing the effectiveness of the first keywords selected.
Solution: To keep up with changing trends, update your keyword map regularly through thorough research. You can also track variations in keyword popularity by monitoring changing keyword difficulty using tools like Marketing Miner. Keeping an eye on your website's performance indicators is also essential for spotting changes in user behaviour and modifying your keyword mapping appropriately. Use a dynamic keyword strategy that enables ongoing evaluation and modification to stay relevant.
So, how can you avoid these problems and create a robust keyword map? Follow the best practices highlighted below!
Best Practices For Keyword Mapping
Here are the top best practices you can follow to create a robust keyword map for your website:
Leverage AI and Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence and machine learning can facilitate deeper insights and process automation, which can, in turn, greatly improve keyword research and mapping.
By analysing massive datasets with AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Google's BERT, you can better understand user intent. You can also automate the clustering process to ensure keywords are categorized according to search intent and semantic relevance.
Understand Semantic Search
Creating content that fulfils your audience's search needs and ranks highly in search engines requires an understanding of semantic search and user intent. Adequate comprehension of how these tie in together to boost search visibility can increase SEO and relevancy.
To get started, identify and use keywords from Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). But what are they? LSI keywords are semantically relevant phrases that help search engines decipher your content's context. These are typically long-tail keywords that offer low competition, thus making it easier for you to rank your website using them. You can also arrange content around main industry subjects that interest your audience and associated sub-topics that offer thorough coverage and enhance user experience to make the most of semantic search.
Conduct Regular User Intent Analysis
Understanding the purpose of users’ search queries is crucial to producing information that is interesting and appealing to them. To better understand what people seek, classify search intent into informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional categories. Aligning your content with user search intent also helps increase user happiness and engagement, thus improving click-through rates and conversions.
Final Thoughts
Mastering SEO keyword mapping is a journey involving constant adaptation and optimization. It may require some time, but a robust keyword map can make content creation and optimization infinitely easier.
To map your keywords correctly, you must start with thorough keyword research and then create keyword and topic clusters to build your keyword map. Once you accomplish that, you simply have to assign those keywords to the web page URLs on your site and optimize and maintain them in an ongoing effort to better your website’s rankings on SERPs.
Leverage tools such as Marketing Miner for keyword research and generate bulk keyword analysis reports outlining search volume, SERP position, and keyword difficulty to identify relevant keywords that can easily get your website to the top of Google or Bing SERPs!
