Keyword to content mapping for long form & product pages

Search engine optimization through content marketing used to be simple.

You could literally ‘throw content at the problem’ and in a few months, Google would be sending people to your website for free. Sweet!

The problem is; those days are done.

If your website has been bleeding traffic over the last few years, chances are the root cause of your problem is content.

Google has been tightening the screws, with the goal of only showing 1 page per website for each keyword. Along with this, competition is getting tougher in almost every niche.

What this means is, to rank #1 for your desired keywords, you really need to be putting your best foot forward.

Three short articles all discussing the same topic is not putting your best foot forward.

Thankfully, the solution isn’t as difficult as you might think. By performing ‘keyword to content mapping’, you can revise your website to ensure that only 1 page or blog post is targeting a given keyword.

Why is keyword mapping important?

When you begin to think of your content as something that covers topics instead of keywords, the need for combining keyword research and content mapping becomes clearer.

Any authoritative piece of content should not leave questions unanswered, so it’s natural that it will include many keywords.

By making sure that each keyword is only mapped to a single page, you will avoid “keyword cannibalization”. Yes, SEOs use complicated terms to describe simple things.

Keyword cannibalization is when you have multiple pages on your website that compete against each other before they can compete against your competitors.

And this is exactly what happens when you use that “1 page per keyword” SEO strategy straight out of 2008.

We’ll run you through the 2 most likely scenarios:

1. when building a new website,
2. when revising an existing website.

In both scenarios, our process involves using a keyword mapping template, which is a simple spreadsheet.

This spreadsheet template includes the following fields:

• Page title
• Page type
  • Home page
  • Blog article
  • Category page
  • Product page
  • Other
• URL
• Primary keyword
• Monthly search volume
• Target word count
• Secondary keywords

Each individual row in this spreadsheet relates to a single page on your website (regardless of the page type).

While some keyword mapping tools exist, such as in Website Auditor by SEO Powersuite, we find that they create more confusion than clarity.

Something about the simplicity of a spreadsheet, and no proprietary software seems to work well for everyone, from experienced SEO professionals, marketing directors, content managers, and business owners.

Keyword mapping for new sites

If you are building a brand new website, it’s best to do keyword research and mapping at the same time.

It will take some additional time in the setup phase, but you’ll be happy you did it later.

Ideally, you will perform this task before engaging a web designer or developer, as it helps them immensely by giving them a clearer vision of the new site’s structure.