Keyword Mapping: New tricks for SEO optimization

We know keywords drive traffic to your site. But since many visitors won’t come in the front door, keyword mapping is a great tool to expand subdirectories and build up your backlink portfolio. This useful technique also boosts your chances of ranking for keywords maybe not used in the past.

What is keyword mapping? This is an analytical technique that allows your team to dig deeper helping you uncover where to optimize and where to build content. It’s research-driven and is a usable framework for the keywords that mirror your site’s structure.  

Getting started: In our blog post, “Small Business SEO and Content: How to Get Good to Great”, we touched on the importance of looking over your shoulder at the competition. With that in mind, simple competitive research is part of the first step in keyword mapping. Gather as many keywords as you can for which you want your site to appear. Think like a customer and like your competition. Use the easy HTML source code process in our previous post to locate the keywords your top 5 competitors use. To keep it simple and for mapping purposes, choose the top 50 keywords you find. SEMRush has easy tools for putting all of this data into mapping spreadsheets.

Putting it all together: Once you have your top 50 keywords, group the terms that answer the same question, thinking like a searcher. Pair similar keywords based on potential categories or new page potential. Using this process, you will have several separate categories by the end.

After organizing your keywords, brainstorm ways to use each set to improve your site structure and potential pages. The goal is to construct a logical path for both search engines and searchers alike to find you.

Making it work: The last step is to take a closer look at your URL category first. Piece together your site in a way that makes sense using these new URL potentials first. Then use the subdirectories category to brainstorm content pages. Use your keyword map to identify potential new URLs, blog posts or new downloadable assets like e-books. Keep in mind that even if a set of keywords don’t make to the new URL list, they could be great content-generator tools.

Keyword mapping is an ongoing process to ensure your visitors are finding your site based on their needs and keywords.