You know what keywords are of course. They are the words you most want Google to see when it crawls your article, blog, or landing page. Words that will rank your page for users to easily find and connect with your business.
Keyword Maps are a useful tool as they allow you to see what terms people are searching for and helps you to create and optimise your articles, blogs, and website page’s keywords based on what you discover.
Five Steps to Creating a Keyword Map:
1. Enter your main products, services, or offerings into Google Ads
Google Ads has a great keyword research tool that helps you get ideas about new keywords. Creating a Google Ads account is easy to do, and you can choose to have no billing included so it won’t cost you anything.
The first step is to enter your main products or services. You can find the keyword planner in the menu under “Tools & Settings” and using the “Keyword Planner” under planning.
Click on “Discover new keywords” and enter in up to 10 keywords, products, or services that are most relevant to your business.
For this example, we will be using the words “SEO agency” and “SEO company.”
2. Download keywords and sort them
After you have entered in your 10 keywords, Google will provide you with a list. Download these keywords by clicking on “Download Keyword Ideas” and saving it as a .csv file.
After you have downloaded them, you will have a large spreadsheet similar to the one shown below:
Remove all of the columns and rows 1-3 so you just have the list of keywords. Then begin sorting by removing all the keywords that are not relevant to your business. To make it easier, put the keywords in alphabetical order so you can remove bulk keywords at a time.
3. Use the ‘Get search volume and forecasts’ tab and then sort the keywords into categories.
Once you have your list of keywords sorted through, go back to Google Ads and select “Get search volume and forecasts” and copy and paste all of the keywords you sorted. Then download this data by clicking on the .csv link under the “Plan historical metrics” heading.
If your business is located in a smaller geographic area or state, you can change the location and get more specific data. The default is all of Australia.
After you have downloaded the data, you will have a spreadsheet that is similar to the spreadsheet in step 2. Remove the first 5 rows and everything except for columns A and D.
Once you have this list of keywords, start sorting them into broad categories. Find common, larger topics to do a broad sort first before putting them into separate tabs. For the example below, we have sorted the keywords based on company-related terms, service-related terms, expert related terms, and local related terms. If you run a cafe, for example, these broad keywords can be centered around topics such as coffee, pastries, or bread.
After sorting them into the broad categories sort them into smaller categories that are more closely related to each other. Then put them in groupings in order of highest average search volume to lowest. In the image below, we have sorted the “Niche” tab from our earlier sort into closer related categories.
After sorting, include the headings that we have listed above. When you create a page based on the keywords add the URL to the group so you can track which keywords you have optimised for.
4. Use categories to find and sort through your Question Keywords
After sorting through all of the keywords, find Question Keywords to add in a new tab. These question keywords are handy as they help you write content that can be targeted towards featured snippets and voice searches.
We recommend using the Keyword Tool and entering your main topics before downloading the questions, sorting through them, and adding them into a separate tab.
5. Once you’ve finished, keep it in an easy to access place that can be shared with your team.
After sorting through your keywords and adding in the questions save it in an easy-to-access place so you can always refer to it. If you work by yourself, save it in a place you will easily remember. If you work in a team of multiple people, upload it to your document management system such as Sharepoint, Teams, or Dropbox.
Now you know how to create a Keyword Map and keep it for easy access to make SEO that little bit easier to follow through on in your business. At TheOnlineCo. we like to make sure that we are generous with our processes so sharing this with you is our pleasure!
If you need more information about SEO in your business we are here to help! Contact us to book a quick chat to find out how we can help.
This blog was created with the help of Tamar – one of our SEO experts – who knows a great deal more than only this and is a great asset to our team.
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