Successful Keyword Mapping In 5 Easy Steps: How To Create A Site Structure With Our Clustering Tool

Stacy Mine

Editor at Serpstat

Do you build a new website? Then you know for sure that an understandable and user-friendly website structure significantly improves your chances of success. One of the most appropriate ways to build the site structure is to use keyword mapping. Here is a detailed guide on how to successfully make keyword mapping from scratch.

Contents

1. What is keyword mapping?
2. How do you create a keyword map?
2.1 Preparing for keyword mapping: briefly about the keyword research
2.2 Analyzing competitors
2.3 Creating a website structure
2.4 Grouping keywords
2.5 Completing and expanding the page structure
3. Summary

What is keyword mapping?

So, you've researched your industry well, analyzed direct competitors, and even collected an infinite list of keywords that you think will make your site rank well. What now? You should distribute these keywords across the site to meet both visitor needs and SEO requirements. One useful method, which is considered as the next part of keyword research, is keyword mapping. Using Keyword Mapping, you can create a highly user-friendly website. To explain this method better, I'll show you an example of how to create the website structure for an online store.

How do you create a keyword map?

Step 1

Preparing for keyword mapping: briefly about the keyword research

You've definitely heard about the keyword research more than once. Still, I wanted to remind you of some necessary steps to help you do keyword research. The first thing you should do is carefully analyze your niche and your competitors. How to do that? Serpstat will help you:

1

Enter your search query into the search bar and choose a search engine that you need. Go to Keyword Research → SEO Research → Keyword Selection.

2

You'll find Related Keywords and Search Suggestion reports helpful to significantly expand the list of keywords.

3

Don't forget to examine your main competitors: Competitors → Keywords. What's important, Serpstat offers opportunities to find competitors by keyword, domain or URL.

By the way, you have an excellent opportunity to simultaneously analyze multiple domains, URLs, and keywords with the help of the API. You can learn more in our API guide.

Professional Keyword Research And Competitor Analysis Is Now Easier With Serpstat API

For example, to collect keywords for an online store, I do a keyword search. An important source of search queries are Related Keywords and Search Suggestions.

Before you export these keywords, don't forget to sort the list by search volume. Moreover, you can exclude error words, toponyms, and some unwanted queries using filters if you need. At this stage, you can also filter commercial or informational queries if you don't need them. Then export the data in the required format.

If you have an online store that sells electronics, for example, that doesn't mean that your website needs to rank for the keyword "buy a laptop." Such keywords can be successfully used by plenty of competitors in optimization. That's why it pays off to simply abandon these keywords, rather than running a race. But how do you rate which keywords are too complicated for SEO, especially when it comes to a new website? An interesting measure will be helpful to you — keyword difficulty, which shows how high the level of competition in an analyzed niche is.

How Hard Is It to Rank for Your Desired Keyword? You Can Now Find Out With Our New KD Tool

Step 2

Analyzing competitors

Analysis of competitors helps every SEO. By examining other sites, you can not only expand the list of relevant keywords (as described above) but also improve your own page structure. The competitor's analysis saves a lot of your time because all mistakes become immediately obvious. Serpstat offers two ways to find competitors on your website:

1

Search for a specific keyword or queries that are relevant to your niche.

2

Search a specific website that has keywords for search results matching your page.

The search is very simple and lets you find a long list of websites that are thematically related to your search term or website in a few seconds.

1st way. Search for competitors from the beginning

If your site is just on the plan and you want to analyze the competition level, then follow the rules:

1

Enter one of the most important terms in the search bar for which your website should appear in the Google results.

2

Select a database from the drop-down list that corresponds to the region where you're planning the website promotion.

3

Open the Keyword Research section and go to the SEO Research → Competitors report.

4

Click on the search button.

As a result, you will be provided with a complete list of competitive websites that you can save and export. This report helps analyze the page structures. Analyze these niche pages to get an idea of what an optimal page structure looks like. Basing on the best role models, you can quickly plan and create your own website structure.

2nd way. Search for competitors of a particular website

This variant is suitable even if your website already exists, and you want to improve the ranking in the search results and optimize the website structure.

1

Open Website Analysis → Domain Analysis.

2

Select the SEO Research report and go to the Competitors page.

3

Enter your domain in the search bar.

4

Select the required search engine and database.

Depending on the goals you are following, you can edit the list of competitors you've found: delete or add more websites. I saved this list and ran the competitor's analysis in Google Spreadsheets.

To find information or product faster, you may also prepare appropriate tags and filters and collect keywords for these pages accordingly.

Step 3

Creating a website structure

Basing on the competitor's analysis, I've created a site structure, which includes rough names of the categories and subcategories.

Make sure that your website contains not only commercial but also technical and informational pages. If you notice these pages immediately in the competitor analysis, this makes your further SEO routine easier.

Step 4

Grouping keywords

Well, you created the site structure and did the keyword research based on the competitors analysis. Now it's time to group collected search terms and distribute them according to specific pages. Manual grouping can take a lot of time. To resolve these issues, use the unique Serpstat tool, Keyword Clustering and Text Analytics.

1

Find the section Tools → Keyword Clustering and Text Analytics.

2

Create a new project and add your list of keywords to a cluster.

3

Choose the search engine and your region.

4

Set clustering settings: Linkage strength and Type of clustering.

When setting up clustering, you can achieve maximum similarity with Strong and Hard settings. Try different cluster settings and analyze results. What is also convenient is that repeated clustering with new settings doesn't spend any extra limits.

After the clustering is finished, the report will show the groups of keywords: Protocluster (1), Supercluster (2), and Cluster (3). They can be used as the basis for filling in corresponding categories, subcategories, or product pages.

Step 5

Completing and expanding the page structure

I've created a clustering report that I use when I complete and expand the site structure. What is convenient, you can edit these results according to your goals and desires and manually revise. After that, search queries can be distributed between pages of the prepared website structure.

Distribute queries

How can you do that? General terms with the highest search volume can be moved to the most important categories and subcategories. Special keywords and long-tail keywords that bring more detail to the topic suit well to common pages and product data feeds. Of course, this is just a general example, so you can do it according to your own logic and experience.

Don't forget to think about keywords for the tag and filter pages. For example, there are such filter characteristics for the category Notebooks in my online shop:

price

brand

operating system

screen resolution

screen size

processor

color

other features.

The well-known SEO rule states that a page should be optimized for a specific keyword. For this reason, be aware that you shouldn't mix commercial and informational search queries. If you doubt which keywords are best for a page, use the Serpstat Tree view option to examine the competitor's website structure with keywords. Or google this keyword and analyze SERPs so that you can immediately find out for which search terms a specific page appears in search results.

Advanced site structure

This step is the right time to elaborate on the rough site structure and to expand it using the clustered keyword list. If you see that some pages are not covered by keywords, do the extra keyword research to fill the gap.

For example, while clustering, I found that there are a lot of search queries associated with gaming notebooks. Although this category was not intended, I can do additional keyword research and expand the previous keyword list. You should pay special attention to the Related Keywords section, which is an important source of LSI semantics.

Define content

To populate the site structure, you should define content for all areas. Keep working on your clustering project to create the job for copywriters. Serpstat's Text Analytics let you examine each page for key text parameters. The special feature of the option is that the page analyzed is compared with corresponding pages of the competitors. As a result, you get a large report with recommendations for creating or improving the specific page. What should you do to get this data?

1

Choose clusters that you want to use for a specific page (category, subcategory, product page, etc.).

2

Click on the TA button

3

If your page already exists, add the existing URL.

4

Start the text analysis.

The following information shows:

how well the chosen keywords of the analyzed pages fit

what is the relationship between keywords in the group.

how important are keywords in title, description and body text

how popular is the particular keyword among competitors

whether the keywords on the page are present.

whether the length of the text corresponds to the average added value

whether related technical errors have occurred on the page.

Using these recommendations, you can assign a task to the copywriter for a particular page that defines:

keywords that should be used in the title and description tags, headlines, and text

mandatory text length

further recommendations for improvement if the page already exist.

Summary

Of course, there are several little things that should be considered in keyword mapping. To distribute keywords in accordance with the site structure, you have to keep in mind a few key factors that are not limited to usability and still important in your chosen SEO strategy. In this guide, there are several ways to save your keyword mapping time: competitor analysis, keyword research, and especially clustering and text analytics.

So to do the keyword mapping, follow the instructions:

1

Prepare the keyword list.

2

Find and examine your competitors in the niche.

3

Create a rough website structure based on competitive analysis and keyword research.

4

Group keywords using the Clustering tool and distribute the clusters on the pages.

5

Enhance site structure and keyword list and create tasks for copywriters.

Do you have more questions about Serpstat keyword options? Ask them in the comments! Fill in the form below to learn all about Serpstat and its features.

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Successful Keyword Mapping In 5 Easy Steps: How To Create A Site Structure With Our Clustering Tool

What is keyword mapping?

How do you create a keyword map?