What Is Keyword Mapping & Its Benefits

Search engine optimization is all about keywords—which ones you want to rank for and what content you want to build to rank for them. Keyword research is the first step in any successful content strategy; keyword mapping is one of the best ways to organize your keywords and content. A great keyword map will help you develop a more cohesive plan for your content and track results—all in a single document. 

Keyword mapping for SEO doesn’t have to be complicated; our goal is to make it as simple as possible. We’re going to go over the basics of keyword mapping, including:

Table of Contents

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The Anatomy of a Keyword

There’s no SEO without keyword research. You need to know what queries search engine users who are looking for businesses like yours are using. Keywords are more complex than you might imagine, and we can break down any keyword into:

  • Search volume
  • Search intent
  • Keyword difficulty (KD)

Other factors, like keyword trends and SERP features, can also be analyzed—but those are more advanced analytics that we don’t need to worry about when creating our first keyword maps.

Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty: How Many Clicks You Can Get

Our first metric is search volume—generally, this reflects how many people search for a term in a given month. Ideally, you’ll want to target keywords with high search volume—but these keywords are generally more difficult to rank for.

Sometimes, it’s best to rank well for a lot of low-volume keywords rather than putting all of your efforts into ranking well for a single high-volume keyword. Low-volume keywords are generally much longer than high-volume keywords (think “How do I create a keyword map” instead of “keyword”). These are known as “long-tail keywords”.

Search Intent: The First Key to Keyword Mapping

We can also analyze keywords by intent. There are four basic keyword search intents in SEO:
Navigational
A user is looking to navigate to a site (“Facebook” and “Reddit” are good example keywords)
Informational
A user is looking to learn more about a topic
Commercial
A user wants to do research before making a purchase
Transactional
A user wants to make a purchase
Our keyword mapping techniques are going to make heavy use of search intent analysis—it may be the single most important element of keyword mapping. Generally, if two similar search terms have the same search intent (i.e., “Keyword mapping” and “What is keyword mapping?”), they’ll end up in the same content cluster in your keyword map. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s talk about what keyword mapping is and why it’s essential:

What Is a Keyword Map?

A keyword map is a method of grouping keywords together into content and then assigning those keyword groups to phrases. Typically, keyword maps are created in spreadsheets. The columns in your keyword mapping spreadsheet might look something like this:

The goal here is to group all of your target keywords together into clusters, then optimize existing pages or create new content in order to rank for those keywords. Let’s explain each of the columns in our keyword map:
Cluster name
A name that captures all of the keywords in the cluster while excluding related keywords that aren’t in a cluster. Generally, this name will be the same as your main target keyword.
Main keyword
The main keyword you’re targeting—this keyword is usually the one with the highest search volume (and often the one with the highest keyword difficulty).
Secondary keywords
The other keywords in the cluster that you’re targeting
Target page
The URL of the page you’re aiming to rank for this cluster with
Search volume
The total estimated search volume of all of the keywords in the cluster combined
Highest KD
The highest keyword difficulty of all the keywords in the cluster
Average KD
The average keyword difficulty of all the keywords in the cluster
Status
A catch-all term for any number of statuses, including “Complete”, “Needs optimization”, “New content needed”, and more.
There’s no one perfect way of keyword mapping, and you can add or remove pieces of a keyword map as you like. You could, for example, include search intent, H1, importance, and other categories into your keyword map—it all depends on how you prefer to organize your data.

Why Is Keyword Mapping Important?

It Helps You Create a Cohesive Content Strategy

There’s (almost) no point in writing content randomly; the way to drive clicks and conversions is to build a cohesive content strategy. Your strategy will vary depending on a number of factors but should typically include:

  • Targeting a combination of short-tail and long-tail keywords
  • Targeting keywords with a wide variety of different intents
  • Creating a robust network of internal links
  • Creating both long-form pillar content and shorter form supporting content

The keyword mapping process can help you with all of the above and more. When you need to produce dozens or hundreds of pieces (as many sites do in order to truly optimize), it’s not feasible to keep all of your plans in your head; you need a content map. 

It Helps You Avoid Keyword Cannibalization

Having multiple pages on your site rank for the same keyword might seem like a dream, but more often than not it’s a nightmare—and one featuring cannibalization, at that. Not pleasant.

Keyword cannibalization occurs when two or more pages are ranking for the same keywords. This creates a scenario in which those pages fight each other for ranking, effectively “cannibalizing“ each other’s rankings and lowering the ranking of all pages affected.

By charting out similar keywords, clustering them, and planning content in advance, you’ll be able to avoid unintentional cannibalization by getting the same page to rank for all similar keywords.

It Helps To Optimize New and Existing Content

Once you know all of the relevant keywords you want a page to rank for, it makes it easier to optimize content. While you’ll want most of your content to focus on your primary keyword, mapping keywords can give you ideas for how to structure that content. Some examples include:

  • An FAQ section for long-tail keyword questions 
  • H2s and H3s that feature secondary keywords
  • Internal linking opportunities that lead to other relevant pages in your content cluster

Search engines want your content to be well laid out, densely linked, and relevant to multiple queries; it makes for better search results and a greater user experience. Search engine crawlers love sites with lots of relevant internal links, too—it makes them easier to crawl.

Now that you understand the benefits of keyword mapping, let’s take a look at how you can create a keyword map.

Creating a Keyword Map: A Brief Guide to the Keyword Mapping Process

We’re offering everyone who joins the First Rank Accelerators Program an in-depth video tutorial on creating keyword maps, including some of our favourite keyword mapping categories and strategies, and a keyword mapping template that you can use. For now, let’s keep things flexible—here’s a brief step-by-step guide to creating a keyword map:

  1. Create a spreadsheet with the keyword and cluster details that matter most to you: You can use the simple details that we provided above if you need a place to start. Here they are again:
  2. Delve deeply into keyword research: Any good keyword strategy starts with keyword research—it’s the first key to all on-page SEO efforts. You can find keyword ideas by using keyword research tools. From there, you can use seed keywords to start generating a keyword list related to that seed—these will often end up being the primary and secondary keywords of a cluster.
  3. Group similar keywords together: Once you’ve created your keyword lists, group similar keywords with similar search intents together. This takes some time—it’s best to analyze what types of content make it to the top of the search engine results page for each keyword. Compare those pages with those that come to the top for similar keywords; if it’s the same (or similar content) for each, you’ll likely want all of those keywords to be targeted by one piece of content.
  4. Build your keyword map: Now that you have keyword clusters, come up with a name for each cluster, a target page URL, and the other details we’ve described; it’s a good idea to come up with a title (H1) for your page at this point.
  5. Start building content: Finally, you can start building content based on your mapped keywords. Prioritize keywords that you think you can rank for relatively quickly—you can then use internal linking to pass link equity to pages that will be more difficult to rank for. It’s often easiest to opt for content optimization on existing pages rather than building new pages, especially if those existing pages are already ranking for some terms. With your carefully constructed keyword clusters, optimizing for new keywords should be relatively simple.
  6. Update your keyword map regularly: A great SEO strategy never sleeps, and you should be updating your keyword map as frequently as your content schedule allows: Weekly, biweekly, or monthly.

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The right SEO keyword mapping strategy can help you organize all of your content, create better content, avoid keyword cannibalization, and help users and Google find relevant content on your website. We can help you create keyword maps for your website—join our Accelerated Learning Group today!
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