What is Keyword Mapping? Visualize Your Keyword Research

As we mentioned in our last post, keywords are the backbone of SEO. Using the right keywords can make or break your SEO efforts when trying to rank in the #1 spot. In order to successfully execute a proper SEO campaign, you should spend some time upfront making a plan of action before you begin. It’s an important step that often gets overlooked but is super helpful when it comes time to execute your strategy.

A crucial part of this planning process is something called ‘Keyword Mapping’. So, what exactly is Keyword Mapping? Well, to summarize, keyword mapping is the process of linking keywords to specific website pages with the overall goal of providing a framework of where you want certain keywords to live on your site.

We’ve written a guide titled: How to Do Keyword Research, and that covers the beginning of this process (keyword acquisition). If you haven’t read that, you may want to start there.

Why Map Keywords

There are many reasons why planning your keyword strategy ahead of time can help (which we’ll get into later on in the post), but one of the most important reasons is that you’ll want to avoid keyword cannibalization, which is when your pages compete against one another for target keywords. By setting up a plan, you’ll make sure that you don’t waste efforts by having pages work against one another. In addition, it can also help to streamline the process for your content writers who may or may not have as much experience in this area! 

Raven Tools Keyword Checker

Without further ado, let’s dig into an example of keyword mapping for context on how this should look.

Keyword Mapping Basics

As you can see from the below chart, the goal here is to list out your URLs and then place the keywords that will be associated with that particular page in the column below it.

If you’re trying to determine the best way to choose keywords, we recommend you read our keyword research post. For those looking into other free research sources, we suggest using the “People Also Ask” section of Google and clicking through each relevant question. PS – we’ll include a script that you can use in google chrome to scrape this data (free from Pablo Rosales)!

Next, map out the internal anchor text you’ll use when linking to these pages. This should really only have one to three keywords. Ideally, try to keep it 1-2.

Internal link anchor text is different than external anchor text rules. You can go super aggressive with your anchor text ratio for internal links, so map out keyword appropriately but keep in mind that you won’t need to create more than three variations. internal links.

Hint – the keyword is usually the keyword inside of your URL path.

Ex. /link-building-guide

This page should primarily use the short tail link building unless you REALLY just want to rank for the “guide” modifier.

If this seems obvious to you…great! that means you understand SEO. You should be mindful, however, that not everyone on your team is an SEO expert like you. For example, we find that by mapping out the usage of keywords, your content writers and other team members will benefit by decreasing difficulty by at least 500% (a lot).”

Ultimately, the keyword map should provide you a lot of clarity on what you have targeted and what you will need to target.

Once you map out the initial keywords with your money pages and your pillar content (pages that are meant to convert or bring in traffic), you’ll want to map out the longer tail variations of your keywords.

For example – If you want to rank for “Link Building” you’re going to need supporting content. Therefore, you’ll want to specifically target something like “what is a backlink”. If you want to rank for “Keyword Research”, then you can write “what is a long tail keyword” “short tail vs. long tail”, “keyword modifiers”, and so on.

Now let’s talk about what tools you should use to do the research and mapping.

How to Get Data to Map Keywords

Tools:

Raven Tools Keyword Suggestions + Rank Checker

Description: This should get you the keywords for each page. Get a list of keyword ideas from the keyword suggestions tool and then input the ranking URL into the rank checker.

Filter the ranking URL by top 20 positions. This should give you a good range of keywords that relate to a single page.

You’ll want to target about 3-6 keywords per page and you want to avoid cannibalizing your efforts, so as you do your research, the mapping will assist you

Google Auto-suggest + People Also Ask

Description: Gives you long tails that you can target with supporting pages. This is very important for establishing site relevancy. The more you can do to build relevancy for a term, the better, and Google essence

Chrome Script + Free Tool from Pablo Rosales –> Put this into your Google Chrome Sources to copy the people also ask:

(function() {
clear();
let words = [];

function uniq(value, index, self) {
return self.indexOf(value) === index;
}

let selector = ‘g-accordion-expander > div:first-child div’;
const found = document.querySelectorAll(selector);
if (found.length > 0) {
found.forEach((f) => {
let text = f.textContent;
if (text) {
words.push(text);
}
});
}

words = words.filter(uniq);
console.log(words.join(“\n”));
})();

——

Strategies For Creating Keyword Map

Last but not least! You can target any keyword but it’s important you match the keyword and its associated page with searcher intent. This phrase is thrown out quite often, and it refers to a very simple concept: when you look at a keyword, make sure to look at the type of page that is ranking for and followed by the  intent based on those searches.

Is it a blog? Most likely the blog will be of informational intent and possibly commercial if you are using a blog to compare something (think top 10 or an “A vs.B” post). NOTE: If 75% of results are landing pages, then we suggest you make sure to map that out in your keyword map.

Pro Tip: Create a master sheet that has all of the data and then I’ll create tabs to filter the data to corresponding tabs.

Blog keywords are mapped in one tab and landing page keywords are mapped in another tab. You can add more page types if you want to increase the level of specificity, but for the purpose of this post, we’ll stick to the two-page types.

Once you’ve created this map, you can then create a landing page map and use the model we presented earlier in the post to start for mapping associated keywords. Once finished, you’ll begin a blog map.

As a side note, if you haven’t already done your competitor research, this would be a good time to use the competitor research comparison tool for your primary keywords and then you can create a tab that gives you data Moz and Majestic backlink info and authority info.

The best way to use this is to average the top 3, DA (Domain Authority), PA (Page Authority), and backlink numbers, and then look at the #10 position to see what it takes to get to Page 1.

Research Central

You only need to include this data if you haven’t already done so in your keyword research. Regardless of when you do your competitor research step, you need to look at this data to be able to provide estimates of cost and time to rank (note: you can only ever give rough estimations).

Repeat those steps for landing pages and you’ll have your keywords mapped! We’ll end with one more variable to keyword maps.

You can set up your keyword map in many different ways.

1. Separate according to landing page or blog.
2. Just use a master tab.
3. Separate by pillars (keyword research has its own pillar with primary short tail target page and then you can include all of the pages that need to be created as supporting content. From here, you show all of the keywords associated with each of those pieces of content.
   

The beauty of keyword maps is that they are flexible in design. Use them to understand the architecture of an SEO campaign — don’t get bogged down or lost in the details.

Bonus Tip – Upload KW Map to Raven’s White Label Report

Raven Tools Keyword Map

Now that you’re a keyword mapping pro, don’t let all of your hard work go unnoticed! Use the WYSIWYG Marketing Report tool to import your files and embed them into an automated white label report using Raven Tools.

Interested in learning more about creating white label SEO Reports for Agencies, Freelancers, and In-house Marketers?