SEO Keyword Mapping: Step-by-step Integration Guide

What is SEO Keyword Mapping?

Keyword mapping is the SEO process of assigning keywords to pages and content topics on your website and documenting the keyword map.

A well-created keyword map goal is to help you create a good website structure and improve your content planning, internal linking, on-page optimization, tracking, and content update activities.

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It helps you better understand your strategy and where you’re at the moment, enabling you to make better decisions for the future, such as:

• Which pages and content to create
• Which keywords and clusters to target
• How to improve the existing pages
• How to improve internal linking, etc.

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Here’s how it may look:

Why is SEO Keyword Mapping Important?

Keyword mapping is important in SEO because it can help you optimize your site structure and content and maximize the keywords your website ranks for.

Here is why SEO keyword mapping is important for every business and website:

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1. Organize Your Content Effectively

SEO keyword mapping can give you insight into your website's content plan and list of individual pages, allowing you to organize your production effectively.

Having a clear overview of your website structure allows you to understand what type of content to focus on to prevent creating duplicate content and avoid keyword cannibalization on your site.

This makes it easier for your team to write SEO-optimized content so Google can easily understand how relevant a page or article is to a specific search query.

2. Create an Internal Linking Strategy

SEO keyword mapping can help you decide which pages and content should be interlinked based on their relatedness.

If keywords are properly organized and mapped to their corresponding web pages, you can effectively organize your internal link-building process, connecting related content more easily. 

Remember, a well-planned internal linking strategy can help you get the full potential out of your SEO strategy and increase your website performance.

3. Identify New Content Opportunities

If your SEO strategy isn’t properly set and you’re not covering all the important keywords for building topical authority in your niche, your content may easily underperform.

To avoid this, keyword mapping helps you find missing keywords and create pages or articles targeting them to maximize their potential.

4. Prioritize Content Optimization Efforts

Seeing all your content and data in one place, pages matched to your keywords, combined with SEO stats, can help you prioritize your content update efforts better. 

A good keyword map filled with data helps you easily reveal what needs to be optimized immediately and what can be done later.

5. Analyze SEO and Content Performance

A consistent keyword mapping process helps you track your SEO progress and identify opportunities in your current keyword strategy.

It can give you the fullest overview of your pages' and website performance. 

You can see not just how well every page ranks but also what exact keywords it is supposed to rank for.

As long as your content is of high quality, it can lead to higher visibility in relevant SERPs. 

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How to do Keyword Mapping Step by Step

Download our keyword mapping template:

1. Identify Your Seed Keywords

The first step before you do anything with your keyword map is to identify your seed keywords.

It will help you conceptualize and clarify which keywords you will target and navigate your further research.

To do this effectively, you can use some of the keyword research tools to help you find queries with high enough volume and low enough competition to ensure you’re on the right track.

If you already know your niche well, you probably have in mind what your seed keywords can be.

You can simply write a few short keywords that best describe your website and product and which are most relevant for your audience.

Imagine that you have an “email automation” tool.

That can be one of your seed keywords.

But with related keywords and different features, you can include even more seed keywords, such as:

• Email prospecting
• Email outreach
• Email newsletter
• Email marketing
• Email verifier
• Email analytics, etc.

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Each of these broad ideas has many related keywords you could use to create content, making it a great starting point.

You can further research any keyword that comes to your mind and is related to your product.

The idea is to have seed keywords that you want to rank for specific landing pages on your site and can be related to, such as:

• Feature-based keywords,
• Service-based keywords,
• Integration/template-based keywords,
• Industry-based keywords, etc.

It will help you later identify different keyword opportunities for pages and articles to target.

Once you’ve got the list ready, it’s time to narrow it down and expand further.

Note: If you’re mapping a site with some pages and receiving traffic, navigate to Google Search Console keywords to see which ones people use to find your website.

You can write them down as an inspiration and then use them for further research to find more keywords.

2. Expand Your Keyword Research

As we defined the seed keywords, we can now use them to find a larger set of keywords related to the main one.

Here, you need to find new keywords that your website doesn’t rank for but are somehow related to your main pages and seed keywords.

How to do it easily?

Use the list of your seed keywords and start researching one by one to find the long-tail keywords that you will later create content for.

Here are a few steps to do it:

1. Google Keyword Planner

In Google Keyword Planner, simply enter your seed keywords, and you’ll get various related keywords that can be important for targeting your content and pages:

2. Google Autocomplete

You can use Google’s native autocomplete option to find more long-tail keywords.

Just enter your seed keywords and start entering letters from A-Z.

Or:

3. Ahrefs or SEMRush

The process with them is pretty much the same. All you need to do is enter your seed keyword and click on “Matching terms” to get more keyword ideas.

You can also navigate to the “Questions” tab to discover these queries for more content ideas.

Write every interesting keyword idea related to your product within your list. 

The idea behind this process is to get at least 10-15 long-tail keywords related to a specific subject that you can later use to segment into clusters and write the content for.

So once you go through each seed keyword process, you’re ready for the next section.

3. Group Your Keywords into Clusters

A topic cluster is a group of related pages that are connected. 

It includes a main topic page (pillar page) and related subpages on more specific subtopics, all linked together.

For example:

• Email automation (Pillar page)
• What is email automation (subtopic)
• Outbound email automation (subtopic)
• Email automation workflows (subtopic)
• Email automation best practices (subtopic)
• Email automation examples (subtopic)
• Best email automation tools (subtopic)

Both pillar pages and subpages can be created around a keyword cluster, which is a group of similar search terms that can be targeted on the same page.

When grouping your keywords, think about search intent. 

Search intent falls into one of four types: 

• Informational, 
• Commercial,
• Transactional, and 
• Navigational. 

The goal is to divide your keywords into subgroups that answer the same query (intent).

Clarifying intent ensures you have specific pages for certain search situations and prevents pages from overlapping.

And that’s not all.

By sorting them according to search intent, you’ll be able to create content according to the sales funnel to help you easily navigate your visitors for better conversions.

Note: Remember to filter out low-quality keywords, but if any irrelevant, low-volume or overly competitive keywords make it through, use the sorting process as a second chance to remove them.

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4. Map Your Website Structure and Connect Them To Your Content

Now, it's time to organize your keywords.

The best keywords are those with high search volume and low difficulty. 

You might also choose keywords with a smaller search volume because they are easier to rank for. 

Your goals could be lead generation, increasing traffic, or making sales.

At this point, you should ask yourself:

• What keywords do you want to rank for?
• Can it be connected to an existing page? 

You should start with the main pages first instead of the blog pages.

If a keyword doesn't match a page, create a new row and mark it for a new page later.

Take the keyword and assign it to a page, adding the number of searches and keyword difficulty for reference.

Decide which keywords belong on each page and add them to your keyword mapping spreadsheet.

Tip: Ensure to stick to the “one keyword per one landing page” principle.

Pick a main keyword and use it to create your: 

• page title and meta description, 
• H1 tag, and other elements.

Fill out the fields for each page, making sure each one is unique in the outline.

If you want, you can also note related pages for internal linking and content grouping.

For the sake of simplicity, here’s an example of the keyword map for our parental website with categories and individual pages that should cover specific topics for this niche:

If you're unsure which topics to choose, go for those with traffic and business potential.

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A topic has traffic potential if the best-ranking page gets a decent amount of traffic. 

You can check this by looking at the Traffic Potential(TP) metric within Ahrefs for the Parent Topic in Keywords Explorer, which shows the estimated traffic to the top-ranking page. 

For example, the TP for "best email marketing automation software" is 8.4K.

On the other hand, a topic has business potential if the audience searching for the keyword is likely to convert, and the keyword is likely to be profitable for your business. 

This depends on what searchers are looking for and what your business offers. 

For example, people searching for "best email marketing automation software" are looking for recommendations, which you can see from what’s already ranking.

Tip: You can visually map your content and keywords using tools such as SEO Screaming Frog or WebSite Auditor.

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6. Examine and Optimize Your Content With the Mapped Keywords

Consistently analyzing your keyword map and tracking your content performance can help you find gaps in your content during this process. 

Let’s say you’re tracking your performance and keyword map, and you notice that you haven’t created all the articles from the well-performing cluster.

At least with a keyword map, it’s much easier to spot.

So what to do about it?

Create new content to fill these gaps and improve your site's overall presence. 

You might already have content to attract visitors, like landing pages, but you need more materials to keep them engaged and guide them through the buying journey, such as:

• E-books, 
• guides, 
• videos, or 
• case studies can be helpful.

Make sure to highlight your assets clearly and consider how different customer personas will navigate your website, what they need, and when.

Want to learn more about creating and using personas? Read our blog on 4 steps to create an effective buyer persona.

Tip: Watch for new trends and topics in your industry. Being one of the first to create content on new subjects can build your authority.

7. Analyze Your SEO Potential

Creating your keyword map and optimizing pages isn't the last step. 

It's important to regularly update your map and track performance over time. 

Keywords and trends change, so your keyword map should too.

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For example, sometimes the search intent of a keyword may change, affecting your ranking. Make sure to revisit your keyword map as the campaign goes on and add new opportunities as they come up.

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If you’re creating groups, make sure to use your main keyword for each group as the cluster's tag.

Some of our favorite tools to track rankings are Ahrefs, SEMrush, and SERanking.

You can track this using the Portfolios or Project feature within the Ahrefs. 

These features let you track search performance for specific portfolios of URLs or projects. 

You can create a Project from the Dashboard like this: 

Once added, you’ll be able to see if traffic to the project is rising, stagnating, or decreasing from the dashboard: 

What’s great about it is that you can be up-to-date and consistently track all the keywords your project ranks for and its progress.

You can also add competitors to track how you’re progressing when compared to them.

SEO is a continuous process, so make sure you check each page's performance regularly. 

Update or add content, even if it's just every 6 or 12 months, to keep it current with the latest market trends and information.

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To Wrap Up

Creating a keyword map for your website can feel overwhelming, just like SEO audits and managing SEO in general. 

But once you understand the steps, the goal, and the key info you need, you can make a map to improve your SEO strategy over time.

If you don't have the time, skills, or resources to do keyword mapping for your website's SEO, we can help you.

Schedule a 30-minute free consultation to discover how to incorporate keyword mapping into your SEO strategy to track your process more easily and achieve predictable growth.