Keyword Mapping Processes

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From the course by University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

516 ratings

University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

516 ratings

Course 3 of 6 in the Specialization Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Learn the ins and outs of optimizing a website, from conducting an initial audit to presenting your findings and recommendations. Hands-on activities include learning how to select and apply appropriate keywords throughout a website, incorporating keyword research in a content marketing strategy, and optimizing a site for local search. You will also learn strategies for setting goals and client/stakeholder expectations, building effective analytics and reports, and communicating SEO improvements.

From the lesson

Introduction

Welcome to week 1! As you may remember from Module 4 within the last course, Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals, keywords are an extremely important tool for helping your customers find you in an often crowded field. Effective use of keywords on your optimized website can result in free targeted traffic to your site, helping you to reach your business goals. In this module, you will use the keyword research you conducted in the last course and you will learn a process for selecting the best keywords to optimize your website in search results. We will look at concepts like relevancy to the site, keyword intent, how competitive the keyword is in organic search, and how well that term might convert once it receives traffic. We’ll also discuss how to identify and evaluate competitors, how to map keywords to pages, and how to create a keyword map for your clients and your own site. There is a lot to discuss in our first module, so if you are taking this course without learning the materials of module 4 within the SEO Fundamentals course, I highly recommend you complete that module before diving into this one. So, let’s get started learning how to apply keyword research!

Applying Keyword Research Introduction0:48

Why do a Competitive Analysis?2:44

How to Perform a Competitive Keyword Analysis5:48

Analyzing Your Competition6:59

Develop a Plan to Compete10:18

Competing With Page Level Information4:10

Dealing with Larger Sites4:09

Mapping Keywords to Pages3:40

Questions to Ask3:52

Keyword Mapping Processes4:32

Creating a Keyword Map for Clients4:12

Meet the Instructors

Rebekah May
SEO Manager & Lead SEO Instructor, Lead Qual
UC Davis Division of Continuing and Professional Education

Welcome back.

So far in this module, we've discussed how to identify effective keywords and

how they can make our website more competitive.

We've also asked ourselves some important questions so

that we can make the best decisions about which keywords to use.

In this lesson, we'll discuss the actual mapping process and

take a look at the do's and don'ts of keyword mapping.

>> During our keyword research stage, we went ahead and

broke the keywords out into various groups.

This saves us a lot of time during the keyword mapping stage.

We already have groups of keywords related to e-textbook rentals,

electronic textbook rentals, online textbook rentals,

as well as keyword groups with qualifiers like cheap or affordable.

In addition to those,

we have another group of long tailed questions the user may be asking.

We will want to make sure we have pages dedicated to various keyword groups, so

we don't have one page dedicated to electronic textbook rentals and

another dedicated to something like e-textbook rentals,

because these are too similar in nature.

Here's an example of something that you would not want to do when mapping your

keywords out to different pages.

You can see that page one and

page two are very similar, as are page three and page four.

A better keyword page layout would look more like this.

Ideally the homepage should be a bit broader in scope and

target slightly more competitive phrases.

Since most of your site's authority will reside in the homepage,

this has a greater opportunity to rank for more competitive key words.

For example, if your site's main focus was on college textbook rentals,

then that keyword group would be really relevant to the home page.

And give search engines and

users a better idea of what your site is about as a whole.

Other pages can focus on more specific yet less competitive terms.

One page could focus on affordability.

You might want to include studies about how renting textbooks is

cheaper than buying.

Or just information about how your company makes the textbook rental process

affordable.

In this page you should use a variety of synonyms to increase your relevance for

that topic, as well as capture additional search volume.

This would include key words like affordable, economical and low cost.

Another page could be text book rental comparison.

This could capture terms like renting versus buying text books or

whether it is better to rent textbooks or buy used textbooks and sell these back.

Textbook rental reviews is a keyword I pulled up under my general textbook

rentals research in the first tab of the keyword research spreadsheet.

This keyword doesn't conflict with related keywords and

can be a great page to showcase reviews from satisfied clients.

You can then target keywords related to online textbook rentals.

Perhaps the page like How our online textbook rentals work, and

discuss your process and how easy it is.

This page could also focus more on the ability to rent physical textbooks online,

and have them delivered to your home.

Another page could focus on the e-textbook side, where you may be able to log into

the site and view your textbook, or make notes, or even download the textbook.

Another page most sites have is an FAQ or a Q & A area.

The keyword research we performed under our questions tab in the spreadsheet

shows a variety of questions that can be included in an FAQ section.

Questions like, it is better to rent or

buy textbooks, can then have a short answer and

a link back to a page that best knows that query, like textbook rental comparison.

Now this example is just a visual for

how different pages can target unique sets of keywords.

A better way to present this to a client might be as an Excel or

Word document which includes the actual keywords you plan to use,

the URL of the page, and more.

I personally prefer to use Excel.

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