How to optimize and future-proof your website using keyword mapping
Creating a clear plan is essential for all areas of digital marketing.
Without knowing your goals, it is impossible to achieve them, and if you do not have a map, it isn’t easy to know where to go.
Keyword strategy planning plays a vital role in this as it supports the optimization of your website and lays the foundation for effective content creation.
Keyword mapping is the process of designating or mapping keywords to particular web pages on a site by using keyword research. By using your designed mapping process, you will then be in a position to make targeted on-page SEO recommendations to help improve the page and increase its relevancy to the mapped keywords.
How keyword mapping improves your SEO
Keyword mapping can help you set up an SEO-friendly website structure, and it acts as a guide for your content strategy in multiple ways. For example:
- It supports you in building out and scaling various content verticals.
- It enables you to create a website structure that offers visitors an exceptional user experience by setting up intuitive navigation for website visitors.
- It gives more options for your marketing team to identify growth opportunities, for example, enhancing internal and external links, maximizing your content, and optimizing your conversion rate.
Keyword mapping is a critical part of improving your website’s user experience, and, along with enhancing your content strategy, it also helps boost your SEO strategy in various ways:
- Enabling your team to create and maintain a wide-ranging internal linking strategy.
- Guiding your on-page and off-page SEO content strategy
- Helping your team to evade duplicate content errors
- Making the user search intent more visible
- Ensuring that your keywords are optimized throughout your content
How to enhance your site structure using keyword mapping
Below are some of the key steps for successful keyword mapping:
Audit your website and review the existing sitemap
As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, in order to know where you are going, you should have some direction. The first step in this process is performing a robust site audit. Using this information, you will be able to review your website and identify any potential issues and how to fix them.
Conduct keyword research
Keyword research will lay the foundation for effective keyword mapping. However, for your focus keywords to be as relevant as possible, you must also look closely at search intent.
Search intent is the reason for a user’s search. It is also known as user, audience, or keyword intent.
Search intent was a part of Google’s recent algorithm updates, so it should be paid close attention to. Focusing on search intent allows you to direct your efforts towards bottom-of-the-funnel searches; a bottom-of-the-funnel keyword relates to when a user conducts a search at the time when they are potentially looking to make a purchase.
Setting up a keyword map
Once you have conducted the site audit and keyword research, you are now ready to create a keyword map. Referring to your keyword list, you can start grouping or “clustering” these keywords based on their search intent and considering potential content verticals.
Revising your site structure
Using the keyword map, you now have the available information to optimize your site structure for search engine crawlers and website users.
When updating any page URLs or directories, take care to make use of redirects, so your website users do not get hit with broken links. When adding any new content, be sure to keep your topic ideas organized by using a keyword map that will support you in scaling your content and website in a structured way.
Reviewing and updating your keyword map
As with all plans and strategies, it is always good to review them systematically, so you will need to update your keyword map to align with any changes made to your content strategy.
This will help you optimize and grow your website by sharing relevant content with your audience. When you prepare new content, crosscheck against the keywords in your keyword map and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Conclusion
Creating a keyword map is essential for content strategies because it supports your content and broader digital marketing strategy. As search engines and search intent evolve, maintaining a keyword map will solidify your digital strategy.
A practical keyword map gives your content marketing direction. Once you understand what your target audience is searching for and how relevant these searches are to your offering, you can customize your content to offer users more value. By achieving this, your website will be viewed as a valuable resource, which can help grow your brand and support sales growth.
If you have any questions about SEO or websites, please feel free to contact our expert team at info@relevantaudience.com for more information.
