What Is Keyword Mapping?

Before we address what keyword mapping is first it is important to know what keywords are. Keywords are ideas and phrases that represent the content on your page. This includes any content, such as words, videos, and pictures on your webpage. The hope is that when a user searchers for something if you have a relevant keyword to their search term your website will appear. To learn more about keywords click here to check out a more in depth article we wrote.

What Is Keyword Mapping?

In its simplest form keyword mapping is the selection of keywords for each page on a website to mirror relevant search terms users might be looking for. It is important to have keywords on a website that customers are searching for not just the company. The company might believe that a customer will search using certain phrases, but in fact they may be using completely different keywords and phrasing that are not currently on the website. That is why it is important to do in depth keyword research while completing keyword mapping. The Keyword Mapping Process

1. Research and Select Keywords: The first thing is to determine the phrase you think people may search for when looking for your business. For example, let’s act as if we are a website that provides information on restaurants for the Capital Region. We are going to specifically look for restaurants in Troy, New York using a phrase of “Restaurants Troy NY”. We believe this is phrase people commonly use to search for restaurants in that area. From here we can type this phrase into a keyword tool such as those available on SEMRush, Moz, or Google Keyword Planner. These tools will generate a number of keywords that people are actually using in relation to that phrase. It is important to pick a keyword that has a strong search volume and a low competitive rate.

2. Select Potential Keywords for Each Web Page: Next, we need to group together keywords that are related and could be used on a particular web page on your website. Below is an image with the keywords based on restaurant nationality from the top 100 keywords based on the phrase “Restaurants Troy, NY”. Each of the keywords differ in their search volume and keyword difficulty. Depending on the content on the web page we will decide what keywords match best and use it or based on our keyword results we may want to make a brand-new web page. For example, “Italian Restaurants Troy NY” has an extremely high search volume and if there is not currently a page on my website with information on Italian restaurants in the Troy area then I am going to want to create one.

3. Keyword Selection: Sometimes two keywords make sense for a particular web page. From here you need to decide what makes the most sense for your website. Below we can see that “Mexican Restaurant Troy NY” and “Spanish Restaurant Troy NY” have the same search volume but have differing keyword difficulty. In this case we recommend using the keyword “Mexican Restaurant Troy NY” because of its slightly lower keyword difficulty. Using a term with a lower keyword difficulty, will increase the chance that your website will be found near the top of the search results for that keyword.

4. Create an SEO Spreadsheet: Once all the keywords have been grouped and selected for each web page it is time to decide where these keywords will be used on each page. It is important that the keyword selected goes in a number of places on the front-end and back-end of the website. Continuing with our “Mexican Restaurant Troy NY” keyword we will want to include it in the meta description for the page, the alt image tag for the image on the page, add it as one of the meta tags, make it the title for the page, and the header 1 (H1) tag on the page. It is also important that the URL for the web page includes the keyword.

5. Implementation & Analysis: Once you have completed steps 1-4 for each web page it is time to make changes to the website. For each web page it is important to carefully go through and make changes to the URL, page title, header tag (H1), meta description, image alt tag, and lastly add the new primary keyword to the meta tags. Each website platform is different, so make sure you continually save and publish the changes you want to be permanent. After about a month check to see if there have been any changes to website traffic or the website’s search ranking. For the pages that did not improve search traffic it is a good opportunity to look at new possible keywords for that page.

Remember, to maintain your search engine rankings, you will need to perform regular review and updates to your search engine optimization. This is a dynamic and constantly changing world with your competition working hard to rank high on search engines. To appear on the first page, you will need to pay attention to SEO on a frequent and regular basis. However, all this effort is well worth it for valuable website visitors!

Finding and selecting new keywords can be a challenge. We are here to help! If you need help selecting appropriate keywords or increasing your search engine optimization (SEO) contact us today or book a meeting now!

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