What is Keyword Mapping in SEO?
In the world of SEO, keyword mapping is the process that helps marketers improve their website’s search engine ranking by identifying and targeting the right keywords. Developing a keyword mapping strategy involves researching relevant keywords and mapping them to individual pages on your website, based on their intent and relevancy. This process is essential for both on-page optimization of existing pages as well as new content creation efforts.
In this blog post, we will explore the importance of researching keywords in your industry and competitive landscape, how to leverage the holistic keyword profile for your site, and how to research keyword groups for each individual page’s intent to build an SEO information architecture that informs your ongoing SEO strategy.
The Importance of Researching Keywords in Your Industry and Competitive Landscape
Keyword research is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy. It helps you understand what your target audience is searching for, how they search for it, and what specific ideas and solutions they’re looking to solve. The benefit of keyword mapping is that this process allows you to optimize your website and content to align with your target audience’s search behavior based on their position in the sales funnel, which, in turn, increases your website’s visibility in search results and drives traffic to your site (if done correctly).
When researching keywords for your website, it’s essential to understand your industry, specific value proposition and competitive landscape. This means analyzing the search behavior of your target audience and identifying your competitor’s keywords, using tools like SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool or Moz Keyword Explorer. By analyzing the keywords that your competitors are using and cross referencing that with the keywords you already rank for, you can identify gaps in your own keyword strategy and discover new opportunities to target keywords that they may have missed.
To conduct a competitive analysis of your industry, start by identifying your main competitors. Then, analyze their websites to determine what keywords they are targeting, and the balance of their keyword strategy in regards to SEO vs PPC.
You can use an SEO keyword mapping tool to identify the low keyword difficulty keywords that your competitors are ranking for that your business has not built authority around yet, as well as the keywords you both rank for that you can improve upon to win more traffic over the competition. You can also identify high search volume branded keywords that your competitors own, and develop a competitor conquesting strategy to poach some of their brand traffic to your own site.
By conducting thorough keyword research, you can build a comprehensive keyword profile for your website that includes both broad and specific keywords. This holistic keyword profile will inform your overall SEO strategy and guide your efforts to optimize your website’s pages and create new content.
Developing a comprehensive initial keyword research audit can be exhaustive of your marketing team’s resources, especially if you have a large website. You can outsource keyword research services at your startup to a knowledgeable agency like Stark Visibility to accelerate this process.
Generating a Holistic Keyword Map for Your Site
Once you have conducted thorough keyword research and identified the searched terms that you want to target, it’s time to leverage that information to optimize your website for search engines. This involves creating an SEO information architecture that organizes your website’s pages and content based on your keyword research.
Your website’s information architecture SEO should be designed in an easily visualized keyword diagram (similar to a sitemap) that aligns with your target audience’s search behavior and the keywords that they use. This means outlining the specific keyword profile for each core page on your site in a hierarchical format, so that you’re not only establishing a holistic theme for your site starting with the homepage, but building a hyper-personalized keyword profile for each page based on longer-tail keywords that directly correlate with the intent of your potential customer’s queries. Creating keyword maps also helps you ensure you are not engaging in keyword cannibalization: in other words, not targeting the same keyword twice on any two pages.
To create an effective SEO information architecture, start by identifying the broad topics that you want to cover on your website. You can look through your initial keyword research to identify terms you already rank for that you want to improve upon, or keywords that your competitors rank for that you need to begin generating awareness for.
These broader topics that encompass the industry and positioning of your business are perfect to optimize your homepage and parent pages around, as well as for creating new long-form content pillars that define the comprehensive topics you want to gain more domain authority around.
By leveraging your holistic keyword profile to create and implement an effective SEO information architecture, you can improve your website’s visibility and in search results for business-critical terms and increase the likelihood that users will find the information that they are looking for on your site.
Keyword Intent Mapping for Individual Pages Across the Domain
In addition to creating a holistic keyword profile for your website, it’s also essential to engage in keyword to content mapping for each individual page on your site. This involves identifying the specific purpose and intent of each page and mapping relevant keywords to the underlying user intent.
To conduct keyword research mapping for individual pages, start by analyzing the page’s content and identifying the main topic and purpose of the page. Then, use your keyword research to identify the search terms that your target audience uses to find information related to that topic and purpose.
If a certain page already ranks on, say, page 3 of Google search results for a certain relevant keyword, you may want to leverage this keyword in your on-page optimization efforts as you know Google already understands this is the topic your page aims to satisfy. Then, a few SEO best-practice updates can go a long way in helping you maximize your visibility and traffic for that page.
When mapping keywords to individual pages, it’s important to consider the intent behind the keywords. Keyword intent mapping first involves the marketer identifying whether the keyword is informational, navigational, or transactional.
Informational keywords are used when users are looking for information on a particular topic. Navigational keywords are used when users are trying to find a specific website or page, while transactional keywords are used when users are ready to make a purchase or take a specific action. Keep these intent categories in mind as you think about how each page relates to the common user flow throughout your site in terms of the sales funnel.
B2B sales cycles are often much longer than an eCommerce brand for example, so matching keywords to landing pages while keeping the funnel in mind will really improve your inbound marketing strategy. It is also important to reference your keyword chart to inform a healthy internal linking structure throughout your site, using the focus keyword of the specific content in the anchor text of the optimized pages you’re hyperlinking to.
How to Create a Keyword Map: SEO Keyword Mapping Example
While thinking about the purpose of each page on your site, leverage your list of keywords to identify the specific terms that your target persona’s use to search for information or products related to those topics. Then, use content mapping best-practices to group your pages together based on a cohesive list of keywords that is both intuitive to users and search engine crawlers like Googlebot.
For example, if you’re a technology startup selling CRM software to financial advisors, you may be looking to generate a cohesive keyword strategy to optimize each of the use case pages on your site. Some possible focus keywords to use when conducting on-page optimization for these pages may include:
- “Customer Tracking for Financial Advisors”
- “Data Collection for Financial Advisors”
- “Financial Advisor Sales Processes”
Then, you can follow Stark Visibility’s SEO copywriting checklist to update your pages so that you have a better chance of ranking on organic search results pages. By using the latter focus keyword suggestion, you can update the title tag, H1 and other elements of the page by strategically inserting the identified keyword profile on the page (e.g. the title could be “Streamlining Financial Advisor Sales Processes with CRM Software).
By creating an SEO keyword map based on the intent of each individual page on your site, you can improve the quality and accuracy of your website’s content, making it more likely that users will find what they are looking for on your site. This, in turn, can improve your website’s search engine ranking and drive more organic traffic to your site.
Conclusion
Keyword mapping in SEO is a critical process that helps marketers improve their website’s search engine ranking by identifying and targeting the right keywords. Keyword research and mapping also helps define an effective SEO strategy for your site that can inform content marketing operations for both existing page optimization and content creation, so your marketing team can be on the same page when collaborating to gain authority in your industry.
By investing time and effort into keyword mapping SEO before making broad optimizations, you can more efficiently rank for business-critical search terms, drive more targeted traffic to your site, and ultimately, grow your business. Reach out today to see how Stark Visibility can complete this process for you, without needing to invest in an expensive keyword mapping tool!