Last Updated on February 20, 2022 by Scott Charleboix
Summary: The purpose of this post is to explain how to do a site audit for your keywords by learning how to create a keyword map for SEO. Then you’ll be able to see what posts can be improved to improve your Google ranking and get a higher rank. With the keyword map you’ll be able to conduct an SEO audit on your own website and you’ll be able to learn how to conduct a site audit. This post will provide you with the necessary headings to make a keyword mapping tool.
If you’ve ever wanted to know how do you audit keywords, a keyword map comes in extremely handy to give you a comprehensive visual picture of your website and where you need to focus your attention.
Table of Contents
What is a Site Audit?
A site audit is a process that you go through a variety of steps to find out what can be done to improve your website. It’s usually associated with looking at Search Engine Optimization (SEO on-page optimization) or with keyword research or other factors.
Doing a site audit is usually associated for the sole purpose of marketing. The keyword map is a tool that you can use to conduct a full analysis of your website in regards to how search engines are crawling your website. Things to be exceptionally considered will be more visible with the keyword map that you’ll be able to analyze a variety of insights on your website such as your overall traffic, individual posts, pages, and much more.
How to do a site audit for your keywords
I was doing some SEO research and I stumbled across a post called How to Build a Killer Content → Keyword Map for SEO by Rand Fishkin who I’ve seen a couple of times before when he does his Friday Whiteboard videos on Moz. It’s no wonder that I liked his presentation because Rand Fishkin is one of the co-founders of Moz created in 2004. And unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, Moz is one of the key indicators used to measure your domain authority score. Creating a keyword map is the SEO secret sauce to how to do a site audit on your website.
I was very impressed in the way that he discusses how to create a killer content keyword map for your SEO. He explained that this is the way that most SEO experts will do a site audit to look at your keywords and look at opportunities for improvement across the spectrum of your SEO metrics.
I’ve already created an excel spreadsheet of my own prior to viewing the post and was remarkably surprised that I had most of the major ingredients for a keyword map. But I noticed I was missing a few of the metrics so I’ve added them to my spreadsheet, and I’ll update all the individual metrics later.
For now, I just wanted to create the shell that’ll be used to look at opportunities for improved keyword ranking in Google.
Creating a keyword map allows you to have a visual representation of your targeted keywords and helps to determine what needs to be optimized and/or prioritized.
There are a variety of sources that you’ll need to pull the information to update all the fields. I’m going to provide you with some suggestions on where to get that data.
What is the benefit to creating a keyword map?
The benefit to creating a keyword map is that you’ll be able to make “informed” decisions about what needs to be done to improve your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Another reason it’s important (as mentioned earlier) is that you can use your keyword map to create a marketing strategy for your blog.
How to create a Keyword Map
Here are the headings from the top of my spreadsheet that you can make a spreadsheet of your own to create a keyword map.
Title Pins Int Ext Inc Pillar Trkd Keyword Pos SD Vol. Notes Title Gr. Speed and PA
Going from left to right here are the suggested headings for your data that you’ll be gathering:
Title (self-explanatory)
Pins (the number of social shares from Pinterest). I like to use the plug-in called Social Warfare to capture the # of social shares from Pinterest.
Int (Internal links – self-explanatory)
Ext (External links self-explanatory)
Inc (Incoming links – this comes from Rank Math SEO)
Pillar – (marked as a pillar post in Rank Math SEO). If applicable I use an “x” in that field.
Trkd (Tracked items in Ubesuggest) – if the keyword is tracked in Ubersuggest (or your preferred keyword research program enter an “x” in that field).
Keyword (self-explanatory)
Pos (Google Ranking “position” from Ubersuggest). You can also use Rank Math or CanIRank but I find that Ubersuggest is the easiest to use and shows you the day-to-day trends. That way you can make any necessary changes if you see a tremendous drop in your rankings.
SD (Site Difficulty from Ubersuggest – how hard it will be get ranked) the lower the easier it will be to get ranked. I prefer to look for a range of 40 or less.
Vol (Volume from Ubersuggest) – ideally you want to have a low SD and a good volume, but in reality it’s hard where both are ideally in your favor. I’ve been able to have some posts rank with as low as a SD of 4 and a Volume of 0. The higher the number on the volume is “likely” more traffic searches.
Notes (a place to enter your notes). This is useful to keep track of opportunities for you to identify posts that require on-page optimization.
Title Gr. (Title Grade – I like to use Monster Insights Headline Analyzer for this score).
Speed (the easiest way to get this is from WebSite Auditor, one of the 4 tools from SEO PowerSuite). The free version doesn’t provide it. There’s probably another tool that provides it for free, but right now I don’t know what will provide that for each and every page. You could check it manually post by post, but that would take a considerably long time. And more than likely you’ll want to spend your time elsewhere to improve your blog’s traffic.
PA (Page Authority that you can get from Moz).
SEO Score (from Rank Math) – set yourself a standard goal that you’d like to achieve for your SEO Score. The standard goal that I’ve set for myself is 81 or above. Now that doesn’t mean each and every post needs to be 81 or more. That’s a goal to shoot for. As you write more and more posts you should notice that your overall SEO score for each post should steadily improve with practice if you implement the suggestions that Rank Math SEO provides.
Other items that you might want to add that you can get from Google Analytics are: Bounce Rate, Pageviews, and Average time on page (just to name a few). The list of metrics that you add is entirely up to you because it’s your keyword map so use the metrics that you prefer to track and/or follow.
For example, I use CanIRank to help improve my rankings and they have a score called Optimization and I’m able to sort my keywords by order of their rank. Without referring to the keyword map I’m easily able to look at a keyword that has an opportunity for a higher ranking with a little on-page SEO optimization help. So this will be a field that I’ll eventually want to add to the spreadsheet but it’s not on there at the moment.
How do you conduct a site audit?
But utilizing the information within the keyword map gives you a better feel for what can be improved. Especially after you’ve been able to provide all the necessary information that you’re tracking within your spreadsheet. Keep in mind that the information you enter will slightly vary on a regular basis. But tracking it will provide you with a snapshot of where you stand so that you can look for improvement in one field or another. Rand does a good job of explaining this better than me in his video that I mentioned at the top of this post (How to Build a Killer Content → Keyword Map for SEO).
Conclusion
I hope that this post will help you get better rankings for your blog and that it will improve your site’s SEO optimization.
Here’s a snapshot of the whiteboard that Rand Fishkin created on Moz to demonstrate how to setup a keyword map and this image includes some suggestions on how you’ll be able to utilize the keyword map.
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