Mapping Keywords to Content for Maximum Impact - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Kenny Martin

When keyword targeting is approached separately from a content creation strategy, the concocted results can often leave us scratching our heads and pointing fingers at the malformed "Frankenpages." By fostering a more cohesive relationship between these traditionally detached endeavors, we can greatly enhance our results and deliver considerable value to our audience.

This week Rand shows us how we can move past conventional keyword targeting practices and generate web pages that won't leave us "running for the hills."

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Thrilled to have you with us. Today we're talking about mapping keywords to content for maximum impact.

Now the problem is that a lot of folks think about the world of keyword research and keyword targeting separately from the worlds of content creation. This can happen a lot of the times because the SEO person is not always involved in the design of the content strategy or what's going to go on the website. They're brought in after the fact, maybe in an internal role or in an external consulting role. That can be super frustrating. Let me show you, give you an example of, sort of the traditional keyword targeting process and why this is so bad.

So here's Mr. Biz Owner, and he would like to rank well for oven mitts. A perfectly reasonable request, want to rank for oven mitts. Great. All right. So the SEO person is brought in, and the SEO person goes, "Well, you know, I want to be able to make some changes. I need to add some content to your website." The business owner is like, "No, no, no, no, no. I already have a page. I just want it to rank for oven mitts." Well, okay. Let's chose the best page you've got for oven mitts and we'll try to make that one rank better. The business owner is like, "All right. All right. Good job. Good job. I appreciate that. You did good work. Now I want to rank well for heat retardant oven mitts." The SEO is like, "Well, okay. You know what? We can modify that page again and target that particular phrase."

But this cycle goes on and on and on. Soon enough you'll have Frakenpage, ooh, super scary. He's trying to target ridiculous terms like "advanced kid- friendly oven mitts for hardcore baked lentils." You're like, "How did this happen? How did this Frakenpage get here?"

Well, it got there because of this process, this broken process of the SEO not being the person with the authority or the influence to be able to choose what content needs to be existing on the website and what content needs to be targeting which keywords. This happens all over the Web. You can click on tons of search results in all sorts of verticals and sort of be like, "What were they thinking when they made this page?" It's not that the website is all that bad or they have done something terrible in SEO. It's just that it is not strategic. It is a very tactical approach to SEO, and that tends to lose out over time to pages that are built specifically for users searching for those things that deliver everything they want in the content.

So, let's talk about a strategy to do exactly that. Over here we have a better process. No Frakenpages.

Step one: Establish the full list of keywords. Rather than going sort of one by one and saying, oh, we want to target this, we want to target that, it's nice to be able to start with that full list of keywords. As you refine, if you need to refine that keyword list, beginning again with this process and making sure that the new keywords that you need to be targeting work into the process in this way. We've got our full list of keywords to target. Hopefully, we've figured out how valuable and important they are so we have our spreadsheet. We say, "Well, these are the top converting keywords. These are the ones that send the most traffic, and these are the ones with the lowest difficulty. So based on those three factors, this is how we want