Keyword mapping and why it’s important!

Keyword mapping, for the uninitiated, is the process of strategically allocating keywords to specific landing pages. The idea behind this is to map out these keywords to the most suitable landing pages. In turn, this mapping gives you a blueprint for which keywords to base your future content around.

First, you need to choose the right keywords. There are three criteria for picking keywords:

Search Volume, Commercial Intent and Ranking Value.

Keyword maps allow search engines to best decipher what your site is about and, more importantly, what your pages should be ranking for. The fundamental reason for the importance of keyword mapping is that the number of people searching for your products/topic far outweigh the number of people searching for your brand name.

Note: Unless you are an extremely famous brand, in which case, you probably don’t need to be reading this. We’re delighted all the same, mind.

The best keywords will combine all 3 of the above mentioned factors. Ideally, a keyword should be something that people search for, and search for in large volumes (1). In addition, an ideal keyword will have commercial intention. In other words, the keyword will be one that communicates with the audience of people already looking to buy your product or service (2). Finally, that keyword should also be one in which your site will or could (with some work) rank highly on (3).

Let’s work through an example:

Let’s say that you run an online tea merchants. You sell tea of all kinds: chai, green, camomile, for breakfast, for stress, for energy, bulk, individual bags, etc. You get the idea. For each section’s landing page, you’ll need to include the phrases that are most searched for on search engines.

Where do I include them? In short: everywhere. It should feature in the text (both body and alt), it should feature in the meta title, it should feature in all your site’s internal links to that page.

Think of every mention of the keyword as a signal to Google that your page is specifically useful to anyone searching those keywords, rather than deceptively drawing traffic to the site.