What is a Keyword Sitemap & Why is it Important?
Once you've completed choosing all of your keywords, the next step is to start assigning those keywords to the pages on your website.
This is known as building a keyword sitemap.Why is this important? Google works in such a way that you need to provide it with the best possible landing page for a given keyword.What is the best possible page? It's a page that is dedicated to, and knowledgable/authoritative, about a topic. Let's say I want to rank my plumber's website for the two terms "plumbing" and "bathroom installation".Now, although these two terms are closely related to my business, for Google they are two individual topics. Therefore, I am not best advised to SEO both of these keywords on a single page.
Why? Because you're diluting the authority of that page by talking about two subjects.
The solution to this - from an SEO point of view - is to create different landing pages for each service, like below:
domain.com/plumbing
domain.com/bathroom-installations
You can then SEO each of those pages for the relevant keyword, and have a much better chance of ranking in Google!
Make sure you have optimized landing pages to connect to your site map.
A landing page is simply a page that you want users to land on when they first hit your website. In essence, every page on your website is a potential landing page!
When it comes to SEO, a landing page is the page you want a customer to land on when they search for a particular keyword in Google.
For example, let's say you're a plumber in London, and you want your website to appear when someone searches in Google for "DIY plumbing tips and tricks". I want Google to show the searcher the plumber's blog page (not the homepage, or the pricing page, or the terms page, etc...).
Therefore, the plumber's blog page is the landing page for the keyword "DIY plumbing tips and tricks".
So why is it important to add these into the platform? In order for your landing page to appear in Google for the terms you want it to appear for, you need to optimise that page specifically.
By assigning keywords to your different pages the platform will then tell you - within the actions section after on-boarding - exactly how to SEO those keywords on those pages.
How many keywords should I add to each page?
Once you've built your keyword list you are next tasked with matching these keywords to your landing pages. This is important as it ensures we give you the right actions to optimise your website.
But there's a very important thing to note when assigning keywords to pages: we advise you add 1-3 closely related keywords per page, and not more.
This is key for SEO as it's extremely difficult to SEO a page for more keywords, and you'll have a reduced chance of ranking high in Google if you do this.
Why only 1-3 closely related keywords per page? There's a few reasons:
Google LOVES dedicated content around a single topic. Google wants to provide it's users with the most authoritative webpages, and so it's looking for webpages that are knowledgable around a topic. If you are optimising your page for lots of keywords and topics you are diluting the authority that page has for a single topic.
This means also that you shouldn't optimise keywords that Google see's as synonymous on different pages. For example, I should not try and optimise 'SEO for startups' and 'Startup SEO' on different pages. They are the same in Google's eye and so they need to be optimised on the same page. If not, then this is called cannibalisation, and it's bad for SEO!
You can only optimise certain elements of a webpage, and so you are restricted by the length constraints of these elements. 1-3 keywords usually fits nicely.
What to do when a keyword is ranking on a different page to the one I want it to rank on?
If you’ve realized that one of your keywords is ranking on a different page to the one you want it to, it’s first important to understand why this has happened.
So, why might a keyword be ranking on the wrong page?
The wrong page is too optimised for this keyword. In other words, a lot of the copy, headings and meta data on this page include the keyword.
The page you want to rank for this keyword isn’t well optimised, meaning you haven’t got the keyword in the copy, headings or meta data.
How to make your keyword rank for the right page?
Once you’ve understood why the wrong page is ranking, there are a few actions you can take to rectify this.
Make use of internal linking. Use your keyword as anchor text and make sure it’s linking to the page you want to rank. This will show Google which page is most related to this keyword.
Make sure you optimize for your keyword on the page you want to rank. Include your keyword in the headings, meta data and copy.
De-optimize the wrong page. If you can see the keyword in the copy, meta data and headings on a page that shouldn’t be ranking, try taking it out! Read here for more
Do you have very similar keywords assigned to different pages in your sitemap? You should try to avoid this. Google might see these 2 keywords as the same keyword and be unsure which page to rank.
Let us know if you need any help with your sitemap!
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