Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful marketing strategy that involves engineering content and web design in a manner that ensures higher web results in a search engine query, and mastering keyword mapping for SEO is essential to achieving this. As businesses need some kind of online presence to ensure success in our digital age, leveraging SEO techniques is a must to reach wider audiences and increase conversion rates.
While digital marketing teams are likely familiar with key SEO terms and general processes, such as keywords and keyword mapping, confusion is common when it comes to executing and implementing such capabilities. The following guide breaks down the steps for keyword mapping for SEO, allowing organizations to master SEO keyword placement on their websites.
Understanding Keyword Mapping for SEO
It’s important to establish a working definition of keyword mapping for SEO in order to put a step-by-step breakdown of the process into context. Keyword mapping involves taking a master list of keywords and assigning them to respective webpages on a website. It’s not enough to have an optimization algorithm spit out keywords and webpages. Your keyword map will have columns with lists of both, and to optimize your SEO, the task remains to decide where each word should go:
Identify Your Highest Performing Webpages
To find the pages that users are accessing and interacting with the most on your website, you can use PPC (pay-per-click) data, your best judgment, or analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Depending on the size of your website, you will likely be optimizing 5 to 20 landing pages. When using analytics sites, you will need to determine the time period in which you are analyzing web activity and the audience that you want to look at.
Web analytics software should allow you to list your webpages, the subsequent session numbers on each page, and the number of conversions and conversion rates. The top pages identified should be conversion-capable, so remove all non-conversion-capable pages, such as blogs and testimonials.
Identifying Seed Keywords in Your SEO Keyword Mapping Process
Once you have identified your top-performing webpages, you will need to determine a seed word that best represents the main topic or theme of each page. Identifying your seed word can be generally straightforward, as it is typically located in your web page URL. If you are having difficulty deciding between certain keywords, you can leverage PPC data and Google Search Console in addition to your preferred keyword research tools. When choosing your seed keyword, work to find a word that optimizes the balance between conversions, difficulty, and volume.
Develop A Comprehensive Keyword List
From your identified seed keywords that correspond to each top web page, you will want to expand into lists of keywords and their variations. You can use multiple digital tools, including SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console, to determine which keywords are more relevant to the content you are creating, helping you drive business value. Go for keywords that are at the bottom of the sales funnel, meaning keywords that are used by traffic that is already close to conversion. As a rule of thumb, you will want to have roughly ten identified keywords per web page.
Assess SERPs For Identified Keywords
Examining the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for each keyword is a generally straightforward process that involves using each identified keyword in a search query and analyzing the resulting pages that come up. By doing so, you can try to determine what Google thinks the user intent is for people using certain keywords and decide whether those user actions are relevant to your organization’s marketing goals.
If you find that competitors are ranking for some of these keywords as well, this is a key indicator that the word is likely adding business value, especially if there are a large amount of paid ads on the associated webpages. Don’t forget to use your judgment of the market and your business’s positionality to determine whether these keywords will drive value.
Make A Keyword Map
After you have refined your keywords for each top page, you will need to build a keyword map for your organization. Create columns that correspond to “Keywords,” “Tags,” “Landing Pages,” and “Volume.” For further optimization in a rank tracker, leave columns for the following months to evaluate each word’s performance over time.
Optimize Keyword Mapping and Other SEO Digital Marketing Strategies With Imagine Monkey
Keyword mapping is a complex process that requires the right combination of web page analytics software, PPC ads results, search engine results experimentation, and digital marketing judgment skills based on business goals and orientation. At Imagine Monkey, our digital marketing experts can help you create an innovative, informed, and comprehensive digital marketing strategy that will help your company reach desired conversion rates and drive new business value. Contact our dedicated and detail-oriented team today to get started.
