Five key things to remember when keyword mapping!

When you are keyword mapping, you have to be flexible to what people call your product or service. Say you run a company that sells lava lamps but you call them liquid motion lamps on your site. If your site is built to attract people who search for liquid motion lamps, you will miss out on a majority of people who will search for ‘lava lamp.’ Keyword map so that you prioritise what people search for rather than what you would prefer to call things.

Don’t be afraid to use very specific search terms, often referred to as long-tail keywords. These will be searched for less often but are also easier to rank for on Google results.

Imagine if a tyre company had a very specific niche in the market where it made grippy tyres for off-road amateur motorsport on snow and ice. If they target ‘tyres’ as a keyword, they will face a lot of competition and their site will not be of interest to everyone who is looking for tyres. If, on the other hand, they targeted the long-tail keyword ‘amateur winter racing tyre’, they would appear in fewer search results, but could almost guarantee that people searching for this would be interested in their product.

In these instances, it is often more fruitful to gain a larger share of a smaller market than to try to compete with the keyword ‘tyre.’

One common mistake is that people use the same keywords all across their site, making in the webpage compete against itself. To avoid pushing yourself down, vary the keywords that you use across your site. Google will tell if you have two pages ranking for the same keywords and push down the one it thinks has less authority.

One way around this is to target your pages so that they are more specific to their content. Have a homepage that explores what you are/do and then have pages detailing the specificities of this, each of which targeting a different keyword. If you have many pages with roughly the same content, streamline the content into a single page.

As well as making your webpages specific to their content, use this opportunity to group the keywords that you are targeting. For example, one of your pages may be on the type of studs used in the winter racing tyre. For this do not limit yourself to one keyword. You could target ‘studded tyre’, ‘winter tyre studs’ and even ‘winter tyres’ as long as these are not competing against other areas of your site. Do not limit yourself to targeting a single keyword.

Keyword mapping is not a once-and-for-all process. What people search for is constantly changing. Every so often, go back through the keywords you are targeting and change them to reflect what people are searching at that time. Doing this will also give you an opportunity to check the other areas of your keyword strategy, like those explored here, to ensure that it is still pushing you up the rankings as much as possible.