What Is Keyword URL Mapping In SEO?

Keyword URL mapping is the process of matching keywords to URLs on your website so that you’re using the best possible pages to rank for each keyword. Let’s dive right in with an example to help explain this concept, why it’s important, and how you can get started.

Let’s say you run an ecommerce business “Alpaca My Bags”, selling handbags, backpacks and suitcases with a cute cartoon alpaca mascot. (If we’re making things up, we might as well make it fun, right?) You may be targeting keywords such as:

Alpaca My Bags (brand keyword)
Alpaca bags
Alpaca backpacks
Alpaca handbags
Alpaca rucksacks
Alpaca suitcases
Cartoon backpacks
Cartoon backpacks for adults
Cartoon handbags
Cartoon hand luggage
Character suitcases
Children’s backpacks

In terms of pages, you may have the following:

Homepage
About page
Contact page
Blog (with category pages and posts)
Category pages:
- Backpacks and rucksacks
- Handbags
- Cabin hand luggage
- Suitcases
- Children’s bags
  - Children’s backpacks
  - Children’s luggage

As you can see, the category pages may have sub-categories nested in them - for example, “Children’s bags” may be broken down into children’s backpacks and children’s luggage. They may also have search filters available so the user can narrow down the selection of products, and this would also result in many more pages.

So we have our keywords that we would like to rank for, and we know the pages we have available on our website. We now need to match the keywords with the pages. But why?

Why is Keyword URL Mapping Important?

Imagine a potential customer for Alpaca My Bags is searching for a cute backpack for their upcoming trip. So they go to Google and type in “cartoon backpacks for adults” to see what’s out there. Alpaca My Bags has a great opportunity for showing up in the results, but which of those web pages would be the best one to appear in search results? After all, you don’t want all of them to appear. You can’t and shouldn’t want every page of your website to rank for one keyword, especially one as specific as this. Instead, you want to send out your best possible page and concentrate your efforts there, to increase the likelihood of this potential customer clicking through to your website. This person is searching for “cartoon backpacks for adults”, so you definitely don’t want your “Children’s backpacks” category page to appear in the search results, because it’s not relevant enough and the user won’t click on it.

Granted, Google may not be likely to show the user that page anyway, because Google is smart and may well know that the “Children’s backpacks” page is not relevant enough for this search. But sometimes you need to give it a helping hand - and sometimes it won’t be as obvious which page should rank for which keyword.

It’s worth noting at this point that one page can be optimised for many different keywords, but a keyword should only be targeted using one page. So, you might want to optimise your “backpacks and rucksacks” category page for both “alpaca backpacks” and “alpaca rucksacks”, but you shouldn’t try to optimise other pages for those same keywords. You want to put all of your SEO efforts into that one page to give it the best chance of ranking for that keyword because that is the page most likely to result in a conversion.

You can also apply the same logic to other pages - it’s not just about those ecommerce conversions. For example, Alpaca My Bags may have a very active blog where they provide product buying guides, travel tips and fun animal facts. Each of these blog posts should be used to rank for a specific keyword, because if a user is searching “what size suitcase should I buy”, Alpaca My Bags will want its most relevant blog post to appear. Blog posts may not often result in conversions - it’s great if they do, but especially with this example, the customer may not be ready to buy and the blog post is serving an informational purpose. However, you still want to show up with your most relevant page to get your brand name out there and build up your presence and reputation for giving expert advice, so that when the customer is ready to buy, they come to you.

How to Begin Keyword URL Mapping

Now that we understand what we’re doing and why, it’s time to begin matching keywords to URLs. Below I’ve listed some of the main website pages and the keywords Alpaca My Bags may target on each page.

Homepage

Alpaca My Bags (brand keyword)
Alpaca bags

Category page: Backpacks and rucksacks

Alpaca backpacks
Alpaca rucksacks
Cartoon backpacks
Cartoon backpacks for adults

Category page: Handbags

Alpaca handbags
Cartoon handbags

Category page: Cabin hand luggage

Cartoon hand luggage

Category page: Suitcases

Alpaca suitcases
Character suitcases

Category page: Children’s bags

Children’s backpacks

This is not an exhaustive list - you may notice that these category pages could be broken down even further into more sub-categories or filtered search pages, and those would be used to target even more keywords.

How to Optimise Pages For Keywords

Now we know which pages we would like to use to rank for each of our keywords. But how do we go about optimising the pages and seeing if we’re making progress? It’s no different to how you would normally improve a page for SEO. Look at your page titles, headings (H1s and H2s), meta descriptions, image alt tags and the content of your page, and ensure your desired keywords are present within these elements. Remember to write naturally and always with the audience in mind first, and when you do that, often the SEO will follow - or you’ll be able to spot opportunities to slot in keywords naturally.

It may be that when you’re tracking the progress of your keyword URL mapping, you find that a page is consistently being used to rank for a keyword but it’s not an appropriate page. For example, Alpaca My Bags may be ranking with the About page for the keyword “alpaca backpacks”, when ideally the ranking page would be the “Backpacks and rucksacks” category page. In this case, you could also take a look at the About page and see if there is anything obvious that is making that page rank for the keyword, and try rewording your content. But ultimately, the main part of the job will be to get all of your desired ranking pages in as good condition as possible to help them rank for the keywords you’d like them to.

How to Track Your Keyword URL Mapping Progress

I use Moz to track my keywords and rankings, so I also use it to track my URL mapping progress. When you’ve set up a campaign in Moz and added in all the keywords you’d like to rank for, it tells you which page is ranking for that keyword. You can then check with your URL mapping work and see if the page you’re currently ranking with is the correct one. If you’re not ranking for the keyword, Moz won’t be able to give you an associated page. For this, I use SilverDisc’s in-house URL mapping tool, created for me by the web development team. This tool uses Google’s API to pull in the top URLs for each keyword. This is essentially the same as going to Google and searching for:

site:www.example.com keyword

site:alpacamybags.co.uk alpaca suitcases

This shows you the most relevant pages for that keyword, only on that website, and it’s a great trick to know even if you’re just looking for some information on a specific website and are having trouble finding it by other means. So you can do it manually - my special tool just means I get a bulk CSV of URLs for all the keywords I’ve uploaded into the tool so that I can get the information quickly. It may not be completely accurate, but it gives you an idea of which of your pages might appear in search results for a keyword if you were ranking for it.

You will then be able to keep checking back in Moz or in Google to see how your efforts are progressing, and continue to make changes to your content as appropriate to improve SEO for those pages. Doing this will mean that when you do rank, it’s more likely that the page you rank with is relevant to the search query, and this could increase your click-through rate and conversions.

If you would like any help with your SEO, get in touch with SilverDisc. In the meantime, enjoy this photo of me walking an alpaca (who mostly just wanted to eat).