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Keyword Mapping: How to do keyword mapping

 Keyword Mapping is a form of planning that makes it easy to identify specific keywords in your niche and locate them on your website.

Keywords are the backbone of SEO, without target keywords , your content strategy is not a  plan and of course your goals will be difficult to achieve.

But one thing that I often see when people do SEO is that in the keyword analysis step , they download keywords and build content based on that keyword without having a clear plan .

More importantly, they only focus on keywords directly related to their products and ignore many other related keywords. The keywords are in the same topic but they think that keyword is not in their business category and they leave it out.

I will not give reasons why those thoughts are wrong right now because in fact very long reasons and it is also difficult to change their mind if said too briefly. What you should do is keyword mapping , more precisely Keyword Mapping

What is Keyword Mapping?

A lot of people will talk about Keyword Mapping and in my opinion, it has a lot to do with the success or failure of the website structure. And what is the website structure you know, it's very important!

Keyword Mapping is the process of pairing your target keywords with relevant pages on your website. It could be landing pages, product pages, or even blog posts. 

What is Keyword Mapping?

Accordingly, we can understand that after going through the keyword research process , you will do Keyword Mapping . Rather, there is a mix of it.

After diving into the main, long-tail, and related keywords you want your site to rank for, the popular search queries are placed side by side with the current pages. Then, specific sets of keywords are assigned to the pages you want them to rank for in  Keyword Mapping  .

SEO allows you to make specific recommendations to help make the page more relevant to your paired keywords . This way, you also allow search engines to determine the relevance of the page based on the user's search.

In fact, you can guess when implementing a content marketing strategy , there's no need for keyword research or Keyword Mapping . The articles will still come to the top with certain keywords, however, the efficiency is not high and your guesswork can waste resources, money, time, ...

Having a clear plan is much better than guessing.

Of course, there will be many people who say that they have researched the market very carefully and that they understand the intentions of their users and customers. But do you know for sure that the words you will use match the words that your customers search for and appear on Google.

Importance of Keyword Mapping

As I mentioned, not doing a proper keyword plan can go a long way and you can end up ruining your content campaign. Here are a few direct reasons if you are not doing keyword research and despite doing research you are not doing Keyword Mapping.

Eat keyword meat

Keyword cannibalization  is bad for SEO because when two or more pages fight each other to get  displayed on the Serp  for a keyword, they split the power you earn and every single page becomes less visible. on Google. Not only will it reduce the impact of SEO on your site, but it can alsodestroy organic search conversions.

Failure to set up Keyword Mapping will create multiple pages on your site competing for the same search query, I mean cannibalizing keywords.

“Is the Bosch induction hob any good ” and “ review the Bosch induction cooker? ”, these two keywords, if you don't pay attention, you will create two articles, in fact both of these words mean evaluating the Bosch stove. modern . It is very easy to cannibalize the keyword in this case and “ Bosch induction cooker ” would be the word that could be affected.

With Keyword Mapping you will combine them into one article and keyword cannibalization will not happen.

Effective organization of internal link building

When building Keyword Mapping , your content pages will revolve around specific target keywords, the content inside will not be mixed with other content pages. Also with Keyword Mapping , the keywords will be sorted according to a certain relevance.

Content pages relate to each other according to a pre-made plan and then implementing internal linking becomes easy.

Support locating yourself

Building Keyword Mapping will also help you position yourself in the niche you are selling. Specifically, you can take advantage of keyword variations directly related to your product such as price, product properties, structure, ...

These types of keywords don't have a lot of traffic , but it's perfect for you.

Provide the option to develop website structure

For example my website has two folders

  • Induction cooker
  • Electromagnetic stove

However, the user's salary in the induction cooker category is quite high and the user's query is usually

  • Bosch Induction Cooker
  • Induction cooktop glass
  • Hafele induction hob
  • Induction cooker repair

So I had to develop the corresponding category again!

Why do I know these things?

Thanks to Keyword Mapping of course !

Create a chance to have a new page

Why do I need new pages and new content?

  1. Add more opportunities to rank and bring in traffic from organic search, by adding more pages to the Google index.
  2. Improve your rankings by talking about topics that are relevant to your customers.

Once I've mapped all the current pages on my site, it's time to look back at my keyword research to find new page opportunities.

Pair target keywords with existing content pages. In the Keyword Mapping that you have created, pay attention to the leftover keywords that are your opportunity to develop new content and new pages.

How to do keyword mapping – Build Keyword Mapping

I think you already understand what Keyword Mapping is and why it's important. After you've done your keyword research , whether it's a new or old website, your next step is Keyword Mapping and now how SerpSeoAZ will build it:

Step 1. Find the Top Pages

The first thing you need to do is find and filter out all the content pages on your website. Are they important, are they converting, are they optimized, the content is complete or not, etc.

It is not wise to optimize all the content pages on your website in order of a to z. You need to pick out the most important pages, landing pages, pages that can bring conversions and above all they can easily rank as soon as you optimize.

Do you already know how to use Google Analytics ?

Google Analytics is a key element in this step. Specifically, you will find out your important pages using the Google Analytics tool:

On Google Analytics, go to  Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages . Here choose the date range that works for you

Find top pages based on analytics

Apply audience segmentation to organic traffic

organic traffic segment

Choose your primary goal,  the one  you use for reporting, and export the report.

Choose the objective you use for reporting

Export reports and Sort it by Pages, Sessions, Conversions or Conversion Rate . Which one to choose depends on your goals. Then you will choose the number of pages to output or export all, for me, just export it for sure.

Sort reports by Pages, Sessions, Conversions

Export the Excell File and delete all the pages that you don't need to pair with your target keywords . Specifically, testimonial pages, shopping cart pages, promotion pages, etc. are generally those that do not bring conversions or are not in the user's search intent.

When you're done, you'll have a list of content pages that you can use to match your target keyword set . The keywords that we will find and create a Keyword Mapping right after.

Step 2. Research and find target keywords

Keyword Mapping starts with doing proper keyword research to find all the keywords you already rank for, as well as new keywords you want to target.

If you are managing Google Search Console , it is easy to output keywords related to the niche you are pursuing. But if you are doing services and do not have access, of course Ahref and Semrush will be the best choice for you.

Let's do a test to find the set of keywords with semrush!

Find keywords based on topics, products that your business is doing:

Type the name of the topic and product into “ Keyword Overview ”, a series of keywords related to your product will appear.

find keywords with keyword overview semrush

Another way to find your target keywords is to analyze your website itself thanks to Semrush. Put your website URL in “ Domain Overview ”, select “ Organic Search Traffic ” and you will have the keywords your content page used to rank for for them.

find keywords with domain overview semrush

Do you know who your opponent is? Type the domain name of the competitor in the Domain Overview as above. Your competitor's keyword lists might be interesting to you.

Put it all together and you get a desirable keyword list . Delete all keywords with Volume Search < 10, they don't work.

Step 3. Group keywords by topic

Don't you take all the keywords you get as your target keywords , absolutely not!

I will group them together!

Group keywords by topic

First of all you need to prepare a Keyword Mapping template , this template will be the framework on which you can allocate your target keywords. Next, you will transfer all your keywords to this template.

Moving all does not mean putting them all in, you need to categorize and group keywords according to a clear purpose. For me it's semantic similarity or search intent.

Semantic similarity

Grouping synonyms together with the filter on Sheets, this work is quite time consuming so we need to be patient. Group them and put the keyword with the highest search volume at the top to make the topic keyword.

Search intent

Usually SEOs will rebuild in the step above and not arrange the target keywords according to something specific. It's a mess and I bet there will be lonely keywords that have nothing to do with the rest. And of course, this will delay the ranking of your keywords.

Of course I understand the keywords you find are related to each other, but if you don't lead Google to find that relevance, it will take a very, very long time to get results.

Well, Keyword Mapping comes out to do just that, and search intent is at the heart of Keyword Mapping . The user's search intent will have 4 stages that are " awareness, interest, evaluation and purchase " This corresponds to the types of keywords they use to search on Google:

  • Awareness : People at the funnel awareness stage tend to seek out websites or blogs for high-quality content that explains an issue. They often use words like what, why, why, etc.
  • Care : when a user has a problem, it's time to find a solution to that problem. They are interested in your topic and they can use a few starting words like: how, how, how, etc.
  • Reviews : When users start to rate different products, they do a search with keywords related to a particular product, like compare, price, cheap, best, what kind, etc.
  • Buy : Ultimately, people at the bottom of the funnel look for the best place to buy. They want a good offer, that's why they use keywords like discount, free side, buy now,...

This is how I organize my keywords and it's based on the AiDa funnel in marketing . Of course, when building Keyword Mapping , each SEO expert will have a different way of building it, so this is just my own way, there are many other interesting ways and it needs you to find out.

The advantage of this keyword funnel template is that it is extremely easy to arrange internal links , according to the " awareness > interest > evaluation > purchase " journey Try and see how fast or slow your keyword ranking is!

Step 3. Sort keyword groups by decreasing difficulty

Keyword difficulty represents how easy or difficult a keyword is to rank, the greater the difficulty, the harder it is to rank for a keyword. When you download a set of keywords from Semrush or Ahrefs , there will be a keyword difficulty column right next to it.

In the set of target keywords you find, you need to give priority to the easy-to-rank keywords first, leave the difficult-to-rank keywords behind. That means you need to arrange the list of target keywords in order of keyword importance from low to high.

With my Aida keyword funnel , the best thing is that you upload all the content of the article on the website and then put the internal link according to the funnel that I mentioned above. Remember Google likes relevance and that's a plus to help your content pages rank faster.

With a new website, it's easy to build content. But with old websites, there are many old content pages, your work will be more difficult. Matching keywords with old pages is your next job.

Step 4. Match target keywords with top pages

Now that you have a list of your target keywords and a list of top pages, it's time to piece them together. It's actually quite a tedious job and you still have to do it.

I already have a list of the top pages on my website by the work in step one. This list is sorted by the number of sessions on the page or the number of users clicked, of course there will be the title and Url of the page.

You will have 4 factors to consider and match keywords

Search intent of target keyword and paired page

Every keyword is always different serving different search purposes and that's why I have my keyword funnel . Of course, so are the content pages on the website, from the title, meta description, page content, ... they are all towards one purpose. And that purpose is the purpose for which the keyword was born.

To be more specific, I will consider a real-life example:

My target website is an e-commerce site about kitchen equipment. I research and arrange keywords like my funnel

keyword map funnel example

It was easy when I noticed that the purchasing keywords would be on the category page, the e-commerce product page. You will understand that that is where users view and decide to purchase.

In the filtered list of top pages , check the title name to see if there are any titles related to your keyword, if the title has nothing to do with the target keyword then you can remove it. Leave it aside, not delete it, delete it is nothing to pair with other keywords.

Next, go to each page with a title related to the target keyword , see if the content inside has the same or talks about the target of the keyword under consideration.

If the content page and the keyword are aimed at a specific purpose, congratulations on a successful pairing

Click depth of pages

The click depth of a page represents the number of steps a user or Google Bot took from the homepage to the page under consideration.

As a rule, pages closer to the home page have more external links and more internal links. So it would be wise to place more difficult keywords on these pages. It's also one of the reasons I sort my target keywords in descending or ascending difficulty.

Target keywords unrelated to existing content pages

It is easy to see the relevance between the target keyword and the content page based on the page title and the content of the page. When there is a match, you will successfully pair your target keywords .

However, there will be cases where that target keyword doesn't have any pages on your website that meet it. Well it's not part of the pairing plan and you need to create new content with that keyword.

Eat keyword meat

What if you discover two or more pages of content with the same purpose?

In this case your target keyword can be matched with many pages.

If I do nothing and continue to optimize these pages for the same keywords , I could face  keyword cannibalization and traffic  , as our pages do not compete with the competition . compete with each other. This will result in low SERP positions for all cannibal items.

Tackle the keyword cannibalism with my one-way guide! Why not?

Step 5. Optimize your pages for paired keywords

The process of building Keyword Mapping does not stop at pairing the target keyword and available content pages , the last step in the process is to optimize the paired content page. This is also a small step in how to write standard SEO articles .

Specifically with a content page you need to:

  • Optimizing Permalink
  • Title tag optimization
  • Optimize SEO standard Meta Description tag
  • Optimizing the position of keywords (target keywords + LSI)
  • Optimize images for SEO standards
  • Optimize SEO standard keyword density
  • Add “Internal Link” navigation
  • Add “External Link” navigation
  • Add a table of contents
  • Make content easy to read

Your job when optimizing a content page is basically like that and I have demonstrated this in great detail in my article " how to write standard SEO articles ".

Final Thoughts on Keyword Mapping

Keyword Mapping is always overlooked and most people don't know about it. With Keyword Mapping you will:

  • Avoid being eaten by keywords
  • Effective organization of internal link building
  • Determine what you are selling and what you need to serve that product
  • Provide the option to develop website structure
  • Create opportunities for new content

But this process will not be easy and the fact that the keyword matching with the existing page on your website in Keyword Mapping will never stop until your website is down. It is a difficult and never-ending process, as a proper Keyword Mapping will quickly reveal the weak points in your content strategy and help you eliminate them.

There are a lot of experts out there who have different ways of thinking about the Keyword Mapping process, but there are always common steps:

  • Keyword research and analysis
  • Keyword group
  • Match keywords and content pages
  • Optimize the paired page

And finally, remember the Aida Funnel for my keywords!

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Diệp Quân
Nguyen Manh Cuong is the author and founder of the vmwareplayerfree blog. With over 14 years of experience in Online Marketing, he now runs a number of successful websites, and occasionally shares his experience & knowledge on this blog.
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