SEO Keyword & Content Map

What this tool does

CM8-382 maps every search term you care about to the one page that should own it. It finds the terms with no page at all, the terms where several of your own pages compete, and ranks the work by the value actually within reach rather than by search volume.

Everything runs inside this single file — no account, no upload, no network request of any kind.

One term, one page

The organising principle, and the thing a keyword list on its own never enforces. Each term should have exactly one page that is trying to rank for it — a page that is about that term rather than one that mentions it.

A term with no page is a straightforward gap. A term with several pages is worse than a gap, and it is invisible in any keyword list that does not record the page.

Cannibalisation

When several of your pages target the same term, they compete with each other: links and relevance split between them, and none accumulates enough to rank. It is one of the most common problems in a content programme that has been running for a few years, and it shows up as steadily declining rankings nobody can explain.

Record how many of your pages compete for each term. More than one and the tool insists the action is to merge, because there is no version of "improve one of them" that works while the others still exist.

The fix is to pick the page that should own the term, fold the useful parts of the others into it, and point the rest at it — not to delete work, but to stop it competing with itself.

The click-through curve

Traffic is modelled from position using a published click-share curve:

Treat this as a way of comparing opportunities, not as a forecast. Real click share varies enormously by result type — on a term where the answer is displayed at the top of the results page, no position sends many clicks at all — and by whether the searcher is looking for a company they already know.

What the curve gets right is the shape: the drop from position one to five is severe, and the drop from the bottom of the first page to the top of the second is a cliff.

Turning a ranking into money

Set the value of a visit from your own numbers: the conversion rate of search traffic multiplied by what a conversion is worth. Two to three units per visit is common for a business selling something considered; for low-value transactional traffic it may be a fraction of one.

Getting this roughly right matters more than getting the volumes exactly right, because it is what makes commercial terms outrank informational ones in the ordering.

Rank by value per day

The ordering that changes what gets done. Improving a page that already ranks on the second page typically costs a day; creating a page for a term you have nothing on costs three or more.

An improvement worth a quarter of a new page is still the better job if it takes a third of the time — and it will be finished this week rather than next month.

The position-eleven opportunity

The single best pattern to look for. A term at position eleven or twelve earns about 1% of clicks; the same term at position eight earns three times that, and at position five, six times.

Pages sitting just off the first page have already proved they can rank. They usually need a genuine improvement rather than a new page: answering the question more completely, better internal links, a clearer match to what the searcher actually wanted.

The sample has one at position twelve on a commercial term, and it is the highest value-per-day row in the map.

Difficulty and the ceiling

Set a ceiling and terms above it are flagged as out of reach and excluded from the opportunity totals. This is not defeatism; it is the difference between a plan and a wish list.

A term with twenty-two thousand searches a month and a difficulty of seventy-eight, dominated by encyclopedias and manufacturers ten times your size, is not an opportunity for most businesses. The sample includes one, marked deliberately as not being chased, so the decision is recorded rather than re-argued every quarter.

Where you do want a hard term, treat it as a cluster project over a year rather than a page.

Intent decides what the traffic is worth

• Informational — the volume is here, and the buying is not. Necessary, and it will not convert this month.
• Commercial — comparing options. Lower volume, far higher value.
• Transactional — ready to buy. Tiny volumes and the highest value per visit.
• Navigational — looking for you by name. You should already rank; if you do not, fix it today.

The donut shows opportunity value by intent. A map that is entirely informational will produce traffic that never buys anything, and that is the most common way a content programme reports growth while the sales team notices nothing.

Clusters win together

Group terms into topic clusters and work them as groups. Pages on the same topic reinforce each other: a cluster with a strong central page and four supporting ones outranks five unrelated pages, and it gives a reader somewhere to go next.

The cluster chart shows opportunity value split by whether the work is creating, improving or merging. A cluster dominated by "create" is a project; one dominated by "improve" is a fortnight.

Everything here is an estimate

Search volumes come from tools that model them, and two tools will give you numbers that differ by a factor of two for the same term. Difficulty scores are proprietary and not comparable between tools. The click curve is an average across result types that vary wildly.

None of that makes the map useless — it makes it a way of ranking opportunities against each other, which is what it is for. Do not put the annual value figures in a business case without saying what they are built on.

Printing and sharing

The Report tab prints the tiles, charts and both tables with a title block you fill in. The problems table is the one to act on first — cannibalisation and missing pages are cheap to fix and cost traffic every day they persist.

Saving your work

The map is held in this browser, on this computer, and stays there between visits. Use the backup button to write a JSON file you control; re-check positions quarterly and the same file becomes a record of progress.

Accuracy & disclaimer

Every volume, difficulty and position here was entered by you from a third-party tool. The formulas and the click curve are stated in full above so any figure can be checked; none of them is a forecast, and search results change without notice.