It’s tough to have an effective and comprehensive digital marketing strategy that doesn’t consider keywords. With Search Engine Optimization (SEO), keywords are one of your foundations and the drivers that can get you top spots in organic search results.
But, focusing all of your efforts on the same keyword or even just a few may not be a sound strategy. Here is what you need to know about keyword mapping as it relates to visualizing your digital SEO strategy and some best practices to get started.
What is Keyword Mapping?
Keyword mapping is the processing of assigning a targeted keyword or group of keyword phrases to each page on your website or blog.
Google doesn’t rank your website but instead ranks each page or URL separately. This means that each page on your site should be optimized for a given set of keywords to achieve your desired rankings.
When you assign your keywords or “map” them, you’ll typically have a main or focus keyword and then a series of supporting terms or keyword variations.
Why is Keyword Mapping Vital for SEO?
As with anything else related to marketing, you’ll get better results if you plan your strategy in advance. Google now prioritizes search intent, meaning their goal is to give people want they want. So the algorithm is engineered to look at keywords and related terms and determine the meaning behind them. If you don’t plan carefully, you’ll attract the wrong visitors to your page who are likely to hit the “back” button quickly.
Another reason to pay attention to keyword mapping is to avoid what’s called cannibalization of your terms. It would be nice to have several pages rank well for top search terms. But, what you don’t want is to have your pages compete against each other in the search engines.
When you have a cohesive plan, you’ll avoid wasting too much time and effort focusing on a single term. Your keyword mapping strategy also gives your content team clear direction when writing for your website or blog.
Best Practices for Keyword Mapping
If you’ve ever thought about the keywords you’d like to target, there might be some obvious choices. But those also are likely the most competitive terms. And if you focus every page on just those terms, you could be wasting your efforts and ignoring some profitable fruit. Not sure where to start with keyword mapping? Here are some best practices:
Spend Time on Keyword Research
When people are trying to solve a problem, they often turn to Google. And the majority that do (67%), click on the top five organic search results. Knowing this, you want to focus your SEO efforts strategically by choosing the right keywords and phrases.
This starts with some in-depth keyword research. You can use free tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Google Trends, or Moz Keyword Explorer to help you come up with some ideas.
Begin with a broad query to identify a larger set of keywords. If you are a lawyer that helps clients with their estate planning needs, you might begin with a term like “estate planning attorney.” Some of the other related terms include “estate lawyer,” lawyer for wills,” and “estate planning law firms.”
Prioritize and Narrow Down Your Options
In fact, for some terms, you’re like to get hundreds if not thousands of related keywords and phrases. Many will be relevant to your efforts and give you some excellent ideas. Some won’t. In the above example, you’ll probably want to discard any keyword phrases related to “estate planning lawyer jobs” or “estate planning attorney salaries.”
That said, you can take the list you’ve put together and begin to eliminate some ideas and prioritize others. Which ideas do you believe speak to the intent of your target audience? In other words, what terms will people that are searching for your services be most likely to use?
Finally, many keyword search tools will give you some information about search volume and keyword difficulty. Your goal should be to target keywords with higher search volume but only medium to low difficulty.
Group Related Keywords Together
Once you have your set of keywords, your next step should be to group related ones together. Using the same example, if there are keywords and phrases related to “wills,” group those together. The same holds true for “trusts” or the broader term “estate planning.”
You can also group terms geographically. If you serve a particular area or more than one, you can create groups of content that focus on “estate planning in City A” and “wills lawyer in CITY B.”
Create a Content Roadmap with URLs
When you finish the last step, you should have several groups or buckets of keywords that contain related keywords and phrases. Now it’s time to map out your SEO-optimized content.
For each group, choose a primary keyword as your focus and develop a content topic that uses that keyword or phrase. Also, create an SEO-optimized URL that includes the same term. Finally, list out the related keyword phrases that should also be included in your content.
Once you’ve completed your first round of content, you can go back and make some of those secondary keywords into primary ones for additional content. This will also allow you to build hub and sub pages with a hierarchy of content that makes sense.
Monitor Your Results and Replicate What Works
As with anything digital marketing-related, you can’t know what works unless you monitor your results. Go back and review your content and rankings either monthly or quarterly. What strategies have been most successful, and what hasn’t quite hit the mark? Make some adjustments when needed, and leverage the approaches that are producing the best results.
Website optimization and keyword research is a significant time investment, and it takes experience to get it right, even if you know your way around a keyboard. Fortunately, you can get help with SEO and all aspects of digital marketing to improve your results. Connection Model offers a variety of solutions for businesses aimed at increasing online visibility.
Contact us today to learn more about how our results-driving solutions can help your business achieve its goals.
Written By: David Carpenter
