What Is Keyword Mapping and How Does It Improve SEO?
Are you someone who is not happy with how your website’s content is structured? Maybe you’re confused about the categories you should make, the content topics you should cover, and the important web pages you should focus on.
Dounting it might seem but there’s a solid solution — it’s called keyword mapping. Keyword mapping is an integral component of any successful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and, in what follows, we are going to cover that in detail.
Keep in mind that an effective keyword mapping strategy can really help your website gain impressive benefits. This post will uncover all the necessary aspects of keyword mapping, including its significance and SEO value.
Let’s dive in!
What is Keyword Mapping?
Keyword mapping is a process of grouping related keywords into topics and allotting them to specific website pages. The primary goal of keyword mapping is to create an intuitive content layout that further helps in content planning, content creation, content optimization, and internal linking.
Additionally, keyword mapping also prevents keyword cannibalization. In simple terms, it means two or more pages of your website are competing for the same keywords. This might hurt your SEO efforts over time.
To avoid this, you can opt for effective keyword mapping practices to ensure that all web pages target a unique set of keywords, avoiding any potential risk of cannibalization.
However, if you lack the time, expertise, or resources to handle keyword mapping on your website effectively, you might consider opting for a tailored SEO growth plan that covers content optimization along with a keyword mapping strategy.
Keyword mapping framework also allows search engines to analyze the relevance of each web page, providing the most accurate results the user is searching for. This improves user satisfaction and, as a result, you stand out as an authority in your niche.
How Does It Benefit Your Website?
It’s fairly obvious that an effective keyword mapping strategy can make a positive difference in how your website performs on the SEO front. When you avoid spreading keywords randomly on your website and focus on implementing keyword mapping and content optimization strategy a bit more seriously, you’ll see an impressive surge in organic rankings.
SEO keyword mapping offers several benefits such as the following.
It Helps Cover Missed Keywords
Keyword mapping enables you to pinpoint any essential keywords that you might have missed in the process. You can either target these keywords in landing pages or create new ones with tailored content.
It Helps Create Valuable Content
With the right keyword-mapping strategy, you can find plenty of opportunities to create in-depth content for your target audience. You can organize your content strategy around various core topics, discussing every subtopic to provide in-depth yet accessible content to your users.
It Makes a Strong Internal Linking Strategy Possible
Having a strong internal linking strategy on your website can influence your SEO efforts. When your content topics are well-organized, it becomes much easier to interlink related pages on your website. On top of that, choosing the right anchor text allows users to enjoy seamless navigation throughout the site. By analyzing these aspects, Google starts considering you as a trustworthy and authoritative website, increasing your organic search rankings and SEO performance.
You Can Easily Identify Overlapping Keywords
A keyword map helps provide a general overview of your content plan and identify any overlapping keywords within your website pages. When you have a proper keyword mapping plan in place, you can prevent optimizing more than one page for the same search queries. In theory, what it does is help you minimize internal competition.
You Can Avoid Content Duplication
If you’ve been consistently publishing content for years, it becomes difficult to remember the content pieces you already published in the past. You want to continue rolling fresh content on your website. But if you have something slightly outdated and you want to refresh existing content with new and updated insights, an effective Keyword Mapping Plan should be your go-to resource. It’s much faster and strategically sensible to update already published articles and blog posts instead of creating new ones around the same topics.
You Can Cash in On New Opportunities and Updates
SEO keyword mapping is greatly advantageous when it comes to prioritizing new content opportunities in your niche. With a proper framework in place, you can work on current SEO trends and navigate your content strategy accordingly.
It Helps You Inform Future Strategies
An effective keyword-mapping framework can enrich the overall SEO performance, resulting in higher search rankings, click-through rates, and more. It provides you with a list of every important keyword that you wish to rank for. You can categorize these keywords based on their search volume and keyword difficulty. With this data in your hands, you can alter your content creation strategy and include new and better practices to achieve the desired SEO outcomes.
Keyword Mapping: Step-by-step Process
Now that you’re familiar with the fundamentals of keyword mapping and the SEO benefits that can be achieved through an effective framework, the question remains:
How to do keyword mapping and gain maximum benefits?
Here are the five key steps to create a keyword mapping framework for your website:
- Research New Keywords Related to Your Industry
- Identify Keywords Your Website is Already Ranking for
- Compile Keywords That are Relevant
- Assign Each Keyword Group to Specific Web Pages
- Create Potential URLs for All Subtopics
Let’s talk about each step briefly and cover what’s most important.
1. Research New Keywords Related to Your Industry
Your keyword mapping journey starts with a very basic yet fundamental step — keyword research. Keyword research enables you to gather as many as possible keywords related to your niche.
For effective keyword research, you need a solid toolkit. Luckily, there are many excellent tools available that are specifically designed for keyword research like Keyword Planner, Google Search Console (GSC), Semrush, Ubbersuggest, and Ahrefs.
These tools provide detailed reports around your seed/target keywords that can be downloaded as CSV files for further sorting. For more concise results, you may consider feeding these tools with a handful of highly relevant seed keywords. The results you get in that way can be further sorted based on keywords’ traffic volume, SEO difficulty, relevance to your products/service, and other factors.
2. Identify Keywords Your Website is Already Ranking for
The next step is to identify the already-ranking keywords that are driving organic traffic to your website. This insight is vital for the entire keyword mapping process. In order to know which keywords are driving the most traffic, you can utilize tools such as Rank Tracker, Google Analytics, SEO Monitor, or Google Search Console.
Additionally, these tools are ideal for evaluating related queries and keyword combinations. Leveraging these keyword research options will assist you find any keyword gaps, improving the overall keyword mapping process.
As you go through this process, you should have enough insights into the list of keywords your site is already ranking for. Next, you can download the list and utilize the keywords in the process of building your keyword mapping and content optimization strategy.
What is more, you can even do a little bit of spying on your competitors’ keywords. Put in their URLs, give the resulting keywords a once-over, and there you have it! A list of top-ranking keywords that can be just as relevant to your own website.
3. Compile All the Relevant Keywords
While grouping your keywords, keeping the search intent in mind is an integral part of this mapping process. Primarily, the keyword search intent falls into one of the following four basic categories:
Transactional Intent: Users who aim to purchase a product or service.
Informational Intent: Users who are searching for a certain piece of information.
Commercial Intent: Users who want to research a product/service before buying it.
Navigational Intent: Users who are looking for a specific location or website.
Depending on the marketing strategy and your niche, it is crucial to prioritize keywords with certain search intent.
You got the list and now take a look at the keywords these tools have produced. Applying your own judgment based on your understanding of your products or service, you’re likely to come across keywords with different search intent. For instance, the list may contain 40% commercial, 35% informational, 5% navigational, and 20% transactional keywords.
You can group them based on their semantic similarity or topical relevance. Usually, each group has 5 keywords that are synonyms in nature and share a resemblance as far as their intent goes.
Sure enough, this step may require a lot of manual work; but you can rely on tools like Rank Tracker to help you stay a few steps ahead. With just a few clicks, you can group similar keywords, showcasing their search volume, keyword difficulty, tags, and even expected visits these are likely to generate.
4. Assign Each Keyword Group to Specific Web Pages
The actual work of keyword mapping is to assign these keyword groups to the website’s homepage, main category pages, sub-category pages, and landing pages to maintain keyword uniqueness.
To have a better overview of all keyword groups, you may put them on an Excel sheet. This way you can have a clear blueprint of which keyword needs to go where on your website.
You can create 4 or 5 main category pages based on your website’s content architecture to cover keywords with high relevance and search volume. You can further categorize these main topics into subtopics, each having different focus keywords for better keyword mapping.
Once all the categories on your website are ready to go, you have a much clearer and more logical content structure where you’re navigating users through closely nested and interrelated sub-topics.
This keyword map provides a thorough outline of the primary subjects and subtopics you want to cover. The layout includes sets of target keywords for every individual page, along with their ranking potential, semantic similarity, and keyword difficulty in the context of SEO.
5. Create Potential URLs for All Subtopics
The next and final step of keyword mapping is crafting URLs for each page on the website. It is significant to include at least one focus keyword from each set of keywords allotted to the pages.
Based on your SEO strategy, you can either target low-competition keywords or aim for high-competition ones in your URLs. Furthermore, you can utilize keyword mapping to create new content pieces and optimize anchors using keyword-focused URLs.
Having said that, it is important to note that keyword trends may change over time and so should your keyword map. Track the performance of the pages and update your keyword map from time to time.
Conclusion
Just like content or SEO audits, keyword mapping may also feel daunting. But the results and exceptional SEO benefits you can reap are well worth the effort.
Make sure you follow the steps covered in this article and start on your keyword mapping journey today.
Good luck!
Author Profile
- At Bigscal Technology Pvt Ltd, Jiten spearheads innovative digital marketing campaigns tailored to the company's objectives, leveraging cutting-edge SEO techniques to enhance search engine rankings and drive organic traffic.
Latest entries
Blog28 February 2025What Is Keyword Mapping and How Does It Improve SEO?
How to22 February 2025How to Change Your Instagram Username Without Losing Engagement?
Digital Marketing21 February 2025How to Use Instagram Highlights to Showcase Your Best Content?
Digital Marketing15 February 2025How to Optimize Instagram Reels for Algorithm Boost in 2025