An Introduction to SEO keyword mapping

What is keyword mapping?

Keyword mapping is the process of assigning keywords that were discovered during your keyword research process to the most relevant pages on your website based on the intent of those keywords. Proper on-page optimization can be implemented if subject to the keywords assigned or mapped to that particular page.

What does the keyword mapping documents typically look like?

A pretty standard template for this is some sort of spreadsheet where the rows of that spreadsheet indicate pages on your website and the columns indicate the mapped keywords. You can also add specific elements of that page like title, header tags and so on. Click here to download our keyword mapping template

Why is keyword mapping important?

Everyone has visibility for what reasons keywords are a priority for any given page. This is particularly important if you create ongoing content or you’re investing in some sort of content marketing effort where each individual post you create is an opportunity to add internal links to other content. A keyword mapping document gives guidance on what themes or anchor text to use when internally linking to other pages in your website.

It avoids duplicate content. If you’re consistently publishing content and writing blog posts it’s very easy to forget what you wrote a year ago or even just a couple of months ago. The likelihood of creating new content based on searcher intent and themes that were already created is high. However, with a proper mapping document in place, you can identify very relevant or very similar pieces of content. A lot of times you know instead of creating this new piece of content with new ideas it may be better suited to go back and update an old piece of content on a similar theme and make it more of an authoritative piece of content.

What considerations should be taken into account while actually mapping keywords to our website structure?

The searcher intent behind the keyword and the search query

It used to be very common practice to find very similar keywords mapped to very different pages on a website. For example, say a decade ago or even half a decade ago it wasn’t uncommon to see a keyword like “Delhi interior designers” mapped to the home page and then a keyword like “interior designers Delhi” mapped to completely different pages like a services page or an about page. The content here is sort of focused on keywords instead of searcher intent. This leads to duplicate content or thin content and just overall content is created focusing on the search engines instead of the user experience. Today the best practice followed by most SEOs is mapping keywords as groups based on the searcher intent. Think about the intent behind the whole group of keywords and map that whole group together to a specific page.

Analyze the pages that Google is already displaying for a group of keywords

Before you start mapping keywords just do a quick search on all groups of keywords based on their searcher intent to see what Google is returning in the top three or four positions. You can then compare that content to the content of the pages that you are considering to map these keywords into. If the content doesn’t align with the top-ranking pages for the search keywords, then consider mapping these keywords to a different page or do rework on the content to align it with the searcher intent of these particular keywords.

Research on the type of keywords -Informational, navigational or transactional

Try to group them based on the types – informational, navigational or transactional. For example, category pages or product pages in an e-commerce store or an e-commerce website may have more transactional keywords mapped to them whereas in their blog posts informational keywords must have been mapped to them. Always keep in mind the type of keyword that you are mapping as it will influence the searcher intent behind those searches.