Moz Blog - Build a Killer Content - Keyword Map for SEO

Moz Blog - Build a Killer Content 

 This week we're gonna learn about building a killer content to keyword map now this is something that pretty much every SEO does, when they do an audit of a site whether that's in-house or as a contractor an agency consultant what we're trying to get all the keywords that we're trying to target here's all the content that we have and maybe.

We have keywords for all of that content maybe some of that content doesn't have a keyword those kinds of things and we're trying to map these together so that we know what needs optimization, what new content needs to be built what keywords need to be targeted to fit with which contains all of these types of things this is how we identify the priorities and work that an SEO should be doing as they're.

You know attacking a new site attacking a new campaign so what I've done here is build out a big one but actually this is not as fully featured as you might imagine some content to keyword maps can be. I've seen them with double the number of columns of these and I'm sure plenty of you who are watching are saying oh man Rand I have even more in my map usually this is done in Excel or it's done in Google Spreadsheets and either one can work fine, unfortunately, there's no great software to do this right now right you could use a tool like Moz or a tool you know.

 If you're on the enterprise side like search metrics or conductor to get a lot of this data right when you may pull the data from tons of different places a screaming frog here stat over there whatever it is on page doing right but what you're trying to build here is essentially all my keywords map to all my URLs and sometimes you might have in fact you should find if you're doing a comprehensive job.

You should find places where you don't have a URL for some keywords because some keywords haven't been targeted yet but you still want to rank for them and you should probably have some URLs for which you have no keyword essentially you haven't intentionally targeted a keyword with that page yet and this might actually help you prioritize and try and do some of that.

Then you have things like you know how much volume does this get, how much searching, all you're gonna try and estimate or use a tool to give you a grade around you know the title the content may be the URL itself load speed engagement that could be engagement could be browse rate or time on site or pages per visitor some combination of all of those things.

You might be looking at internal and external links to the page internal links to say how well link - is it internally so I have opportunity there external to say am I ranking or not ranking because I don't have external links pointing here I might look at something like a page authority to try and roll those up Google Desktop and Google mobile rankings.

The organic visits that that page has received from search engines now there are a lot more columns that you might consider adding you could add things like anchor text if you want to analyze your internal and external anchor text you might look at Google search console click-through rates for some of the keywords here and add that data in it's we all know Google search console, not phenomenal data but sometimes can be useful you might have more keyword driven metrics.

 If you're trying to prioritize a big keyword research function like the things in cured explored key or difficulty click-through rate opportunity importance score write your custom important score your potential so you know you might order these differently based on those kinds of things and then you might even have something like a page level conversion rate how much does this contribute to you know content that converts on my site how well does it convert directly those types of things.

So now you've got this big content to keyword map Rand why am i building this well look this map lets you do a bunch of incredibly important critical things like identify keywords that have no content mapped to them essentially that's saying hey I better build some content if I want to target this keyword right that's work that you need to do identify on-page opportunities to improve so you might look at the content or title grade for something you might go mash that up to rankings and you might go yeah you know wait a minute I'm ranking number 10 my content grade is only 40 out of a hundred I could I could improve that real fast .

I can make that page a lot better by investing in some on-page optimization or for example, you might say huh you know I'm doing pretty well on a bunch of these metrics but boy that page load speed is really bad and look I can see that in the desktop versus mobile ranking I'm raking a lot better on desktop than I am on mobile maybe that load speed is one of the reasons why I could look at something like you know other on-page and improvements like ooh man that low engagement I bet that's drag that low engagement is dragging down my potential for rankings.

So all right those two identify content without intentional keyword targeting so I might find in here that I have something like you know slash flowers which offers all of my different flower options here but I have not intentionally chosen what I'm targeting am I selling flowers for delivery should I be targeting that am i selling flowers for greenhouses or for planning in your backyard should I be targeting that what is my keyword here oh shoot I have not built one in yet and you often times when you're auditing a site you will find tons of URLs that are intentionally targeting.

No specific keyword like should be and all you need to do is some optimization work to help those keywords those URLs target the keywords that they should next you're gonna identify link building needs right so I might look in here and I might say huh my external links that's that's pretty bad and my rankings kind of reflect that I need to do some link building like that page is not gonna rank even though it's doing all right on page it's not going to rank without this whole exercise is designed to help you prioritize and focus your work so that you can do the most important things after you do this audit and you can really move the needle with your SEO if you have great ideas or you've done great things inside your content to your content keyword maps I would love to see them please leave them in the comments feel free to link to things show off your maps if you feel like uploading them I would love to see the columns and the ways that you use this map and hopefully in the future maybe I can convince the Moz Pro software guys to build this for you.