Introduction
There’s no ‘right way’ to do keyword research, it can involve creating then gathering scattered thoughts, using a whole host of keyword research and analysis tools, then figuring which phrases have enough traffic, and which ones you have a chance of ranking for.
A linear process may constrain you, you may miss things that more fluid methods would uncover… but in an effort to tie things down a bit, we’ve put together a process that may help streamline this keyword research and mapping phase. Which, lets be honest, is a core aspect of SEO and proper website development.
Keyword Research and Mapping Process
- Select the pages you want to focus on
- Add the name and url in the correct field of the keyword mapping spreadsheet
- Create your seedlist with the following :
- Evaluate the content of your first page and select the relevant keywords from your seed list
- Add these keywords into the Keyword combining tool to generate phrases
- Sift through the results and remove anything that doesn’t make sense
- Add the list into the Google keyword research tool
- Evaluate which terms are relevant to that page and have good traffic levels (be wary of highly competitive or very generic phrases)
- Select your phrases, (2 or 3) making sure they are closely related to each other and relevant to the page
- Based on these keywords and the content on the site, write a short title
- Add them into the keyword mapping spreadsheet for that page, along with some very similar variations (plural or longer phrases). Keywords should total around 8-10
- Add a unique description – this must be useful for the user, compelling and make use of the keywords you are targeting
- Look at the url, you may want to re-write this to include your keyphrase. You can add in sub directories – e.g.
o Products/services
o Synonyms / other ways of describing your product
o Relevant adjectives (e.g. stylish, modern, classic)
o Regional qualifiers
o For further ideas use the Google keyword research tool
o www.website.com/car-accessories/audio/mp3-players or
o www.website.com/car-accessories/audio/mp3-players/sony-h281-mp3-player.html
Remember it must be well structured & obviously unique – you don’t want it to look spammy.
- Once you have updated the website with your new metadata, run the Firefox SenSEO tool to see if there’s anything else you need to do to improve the page rank for that target keyphrase
Review and Testing
Once you’ve completed the mapping process, you need to give your site time to achieve the rankings. You can review your results over a period of 6 months.
If you’re traffic has not increased, and if you’re not achieving decent rankings for your chosen keyphrases, then you may wish to review. Select some longer tail phrases if your competition is too strong, or get some serious link building done.
On the other hand, if you’ve achieved rankings easily, but your traffic hasn’t gone up significantly, you may want to up your game, get some bigger hitting keyphrases with higher traffic levels.
Resources
To help you with this, we’ve set up a very basic but useful spreadsheet and created a PDF version of this keyword research and mapping process:
