It can be difficult to connect your keyword research and content creation strategies. As you create more content, you want to connect organic search keywords to individual pieces of content. That’s why keyword content mapping is a great strategy that will keep your SEO content organized.
You can watch our keyword mapping video below or watch it directly on YouTube. The video and article will teach you how to map SEO keywords to blog posts on your website.
Keyword Content Mapping Video
What is Keyword Mapping?
Keyword mapping is the process of associating the pages of content on your website to the keywords on your keyword list. In order to avoid keyword cannibalization, you want to map your most important keywords to your content.
After you do keyword research for your website, you want to get started with content creation. Once you create content for your keywords, it is important to create a spreadsheet that connects pages with keywords.
How to Create a Keyword Map
Keyword mapping only takes several steps and you can use your existing keyword list. The bulk of your time will be spent associating keywords and blog posts. If you write a blog article about ‘On-Page SEO’ for example, you would connect it to the best key phrase on your keyword list.
Step 1 – Create a List of Keywords
Use a keyword research tool to pull a list of relevant keywords for your products or services. Your keyword list should be a minimum of 100 keywords, and generally, I start with 300. You can find my keyword research video below.
Step 2 – Associate a Page of Content to Each Keyword
You want one piece of content that targets each keyword. You can group together several keywords for one blog post, but you don’t want multiple blog posts about the same topic
Step 3 – Add Publish Dates and Monitor Performance
To take your keyword content map one step further, you can add a publish date and keep track of performance on a monthly or quarterly basis. There’s no downside to monitoring when you last updated an article on your website and monitoring your performance as well in search results.
Sample Keyword Content Map
Below is a sample spreadsheet for your keyword content mapping strategy. Ultimately, your goal should be to pull the important keywords for your business and then associate the best piece of content on your website for that keyword. If you don’t have content on your website for a keyword yet, that can be added to your content calendar.
6 Benefits of Keyword Mapping
There are plenty of benefits of creating a keyword map spreadsheet, and I listed some of those benefits below.
1. Avoiding Duplicate Content and Keyword Cannibalization Issues
If you remain organized with the content you create and the topics that you have already covered, you can avoid writing similar articles multiple times. Your website does not need 3 different pages of content about the topic of SEO Trends, for example. And, duplicate content and multiple pages that target the same keywords can actually hurt your rankings.
2. Finding Areas of Opportunity for Keywords that Do Not Have Pages of Content Yet
When you create your keyword list, a keyword map will help you stay organized and find opportunities for new content. If your list has 100-200 keywords, then you likely have to create 50-150 pieces of content that are optimized for your list.
3. Finding Existing Pages that are Underperforming in the Search Results
It’s important to have your keyword list and search volume for those keywords along with the corresponding pages of content. Then, you can review your pages of content and take into account search volume to find pages that aren’t ranking well. If a page of content has an average position in the search results of 35, you probably need to improve your current resource and target more long-tail keyword variations.
4. Ranking For More Long-Tail Keyword Variations
Short-tail keywords are extremely competitive, so you want to rank well for long-tail keywords as well. Even though a specific search term may have tens of thousands of searches per month, a long-tail variation of the same search term may have 1 thousand searches per month and it may be easier to rank for.
5. Easier Process When Creating Content Hubs and Organizing Content
One of the best things you can do is target a short-tail keyword and its related long-tail keywords. When you do that, it can be considered a content hub or a topic cluster, where you create comprehensive content and link your pages together.
6. Keep Track of Pages That Need Updated Content
If you create a spreadsheet, you can set dates every time you update a piece of content. If you notice that you haven’t updated a blog post in over 12 months, you can update it and keep it relevant for the current time.
Why is Keyword Mapping Important?
Essentially, you want to set the page of content on your website to the individual keywords you want to rank for. For example, once I am finished creating this article about ‘Keyword Content Mapping,’ I can set this page for the search keyword ‘Keyword Mapping.’
It is important to remain organized because you do not want 5 different pages of content about the same topic. Instead, you want 1 page of content for each topic so you can focus on sharing that page, creating a great resource for website visitors, ranking for that page, and increasing backlinks to that page.
Is URL Mapping The Same as Keyword Mapping?
URL mapping is a concept that can be applied to SEO or for a website redesign. A web developer may use URL mapping when they are redirecting old URLs to new URLs.
However, keyword URL mapping and SEO URL mapping are the same as keyword content mapping. When you are optimizing your website, the structure of your URLs are very important. When it comes to SEO, you absolutely need to keep track of the URLs for the pages of content you are creating for your top keywords.
In Summary
Ultimately, when I create a page of content for the topic of ‘On-Page SEO,’ I want to keep improving that one specific resource at one specific URL. Then, over time I can rank high for short-tail and long-tail keyword variations related to On-Page SEO. And, since I know that I already have content for my targeted keyword, I can keep improving the blog post and expanding it to make it more comprehensive.
