Our Unique Methodology to Win the SEO Battle
SEO is a zero-sum game—every win is someone else’s loss. Best practices aren’t enough. You need a smarter strategy. That’s where we come in.
How We’re Different
We’re not just another SEO agency—we’re the team that built Audience Key, a platform that brings smart, data-driven strategy to every step of the process.
An Insight into our process
Keyword Research
An exhaustive exploration of all the ways your addressable audience searches for information
Benchmarking Analysis
Ranking analysis of your site and competitors to determine and quantify growth opportunities.
Keyword Mapping
Assign each relevant term to a specific page, existing or planned for the future, to inform your content strategy roadmap
Content Creation
Assess and optimize content to support how your audience searches, discovers and consumes content.
Performance Assessment
Weekly tracking of your SEO performance, progressive ranking growth, and KPI tracking.
Ready to Put Our Process to Work For You?
Win the SEO battle once and for all.
Introducing Audience Key
Audience Key is a centralized system that combines SEO planning, content creation, publishing, and performance measurement.
Our veteran strategists use Audience Key to power a unique approach that goes beyond checklists and audits, tapping into real search behavior and shaping precise, data-backed strategies that give you a competitive edge.
Get Audience Key
Lacking an effective tech-enabled process? Audience Key is available for use by you or your preferred service provider.
Building Your Audience’s Intention Database
Our unique search engine optimization process begins with creating a customized Audience Key account, which transforms keyword research data into a well-organized database of intentions. This database is designed to deliver content to your audience at every stage of their customer journey.
Audience Key enables us to:
Quantify and document various SEO content opportunities
Develop a comprehensive content architecture plan and site taxonomy
Provide a data-driven guide for developing or redeveloping content
Extract insights for measuring performance and reporting growth from our activities
Create feedback loops to identify opportunities for re-optimization
Content Strategy Driven By Audience Intention
The Audience Key Building Process
Collect
We gather and organize keyword search intentions focused on your target audience to understand how they seek, compare, and consume information.
Analyze
We use various data sources to analyze your site rankings and your competitors’ sites, then conduct thorough research on specific topics, inputting thousands of keyword phrases into our system.
Organize
We evaluate these keywords to identify successes and missed opportunities, and provide a tailored database of intentions for your target audience to understand search coverage and SEO potential.
Keyword Mapping: Turning Data into Action
If you’re not diligently implementing a keyword mapping process, your SEO strategy is less than ideal and your efforts in keyword research are futile.
What is Keyword Mapping?
A solid SEO strategy involves keyword mapping, where each keyword is assigned to a specific page on your website. Here’s the approach for building a long-term SEO strategy:
- Find all relevant keyword phrases.
- Plan which page will support each keyword.
- Use the mapped keyword data to make content decisions.
- Measure the results and compare with your ideal mapping.
- Follow the re-optimization cycle: remap, re-optimize content and re-measure.
This comprehensive strategy gives purpose to every page on your website and ensures confidence in your investment.
Foundational Keyword Mapping Rules
The golden rule in SEO is: For any competitive keyword term, only ONE page on a site will rank effectively.
Blurring
having more than one page optimized around a term makes it unclear to search engines which is the right page to potentially rank. Two or more internal pages competing for the same keyword creates blurring, which weakens the ranking effectiveness of each page in question.
Adhering to the keyword mapping process means making clear choices upfront regarding which specific page should be crafted around a cluster of terms. Keyword mapping brings to the surface situations where multiple pages are destined to compete with each other, and how to avoid blurring conflict.
Content Gaps
The other side of the coin from blurring is content gaps, which is when a cluster of topic keywords lack a page to support them. Mapping these keywords to future pages is the formation of an SEO content plan. Comprehensive keyword research in conjunction with mapping = a comprehensive content roadmap.
Keyword Research
Keyword Research Data is Market Research for Content Creators: Mapping a set of keywords to a page informs content creators how their target audience is ACTUALLY searching and looking for information. The purpose IS NOT to stuff keywords into content. The purpose IS to speak to the way an audience looks for information and to inspire content that resonates. Doing so leads to better user experience, and increases the chances that visitors will dwell, consume, and convert.
Aligning Upfront Keyword Mapping with Rank Tracking
The mapped URL is the ideal page for a keyword. The ranking URL is Google’s reality at a point in time. It is common that the mapped page and the ranking page are different URLs!
When a keyword’s mapped URL and ranking URL differ, this is a clear signal of a blurring problem. Having this disparity clearly presented and discernable is the only way to identify and solve for this disconnect.
Review and Update Keyword Mapping Regularly
Mapping is an ongoing, iterative process. After mapping and optimizing pages, let time elapse (4-8 weeks generally) and then analyze which terms are progressing, and which terms are not. This begets the re-optimization process.
Re-optimization takes two forms:
- Further optimizing, updating, and adding content to the currently mapped page.
- Remapping underperforming keywords to a newly planned more granularly focused page
Keyword Mapping With Audience Key
The structured format of Audience Key data allows Reflexive to slice and dice customer search behavior in myriad ways. Once data is assembled and organized, a thorough keyword-to-content mapping process is conducted. Relevant keywords are mapped to a designated URL (either existing or proposed).
This is where the magic of the technology shines. Our system is built entirely around making this process fast and clear.
Keyword attribution technology makes filtering, clustering, and updating keyword mapping fast and easy. Adding new keywords takes seconds. The system blocks keyword duplication and alerts users to unintentional remapping conflicts. URL management intersects with keyword mapping, so organizing keyword mapping by page type, section, or publishing status is effortless.
A fully mapped Audience Key allows opportunities for content optimization and expansion to become lucid; the pathway forward crystallizes. Your Audience Key account is leveraged throughout our engagement to provide recommendations and prioritizations for content optimization, new content development, and off-page link development targeting choices.
Audience Key automatically produces page-level content briefs (CB) for each mapped URL. Our ongoing page-by-page data-driven process produces an ever-expanding portfolio of content opportunities designed around the way a target audience searches and connects with content.
Content briefs serve as a central collaboration point for strategists (prewriting), writers, editors, and program stakeholders. We approach keyword research as market research for content marketing. The presented data help content creators get into the headspace of their audience, leading to powerful insights and decisions on how to effectively articulate their content.
Key data points and information are present for each step of the content planning, creation, and measurement processes, including:
- Keyword target phrases with monthly search volume and relevancy scoring
- Title tag and meta description optimization
- Natural language processing feedback on how well content aligns with the keyword strategy.
- Statuses, team assignability, and target dates for workflow support
- Current keyword ranking and SERP data
- Visibility and ranking changes for your site and key competitor sites
- Progress reporting: ranking visibility growth against your own benchmark and relative growth vs. key competitors
- Ranking URL blurring: when multiple URLs may be competing unintentionally for the same keyword clusters over time
- Ranking URL mismatches: ranking URL does not match the strategic mapped URL
- Updated SERP features associated with each keyword
Who’s Creating the Content?
Our services are flexible around your needs. We can work with your internal writing and editing resources, or our team can fuel content development.
SEO Practitioners Can’t Map Keywords Effectively
Without dedicated technology, keyword mapping is hard. A web of spreadsheets, word documents, and reporting tools require more upkeep, making it harder to scale.
Lack of Know-how
Most practitioners lack the experience to conduct the keyword mapping process accurately and effectively.
Spreadsheet Hell
Often, keyword mapping is done in poorly structured spreadsheets — lacking connectivity to the creation and measurement processes.
Lack of Tech
The keyword mapping and data upkeep processes are nearly impossible without dedicated software.
Siloed Data
Keyword mapping spreadsheets are less actionable and make the mapping strategy less effective.
Put Our Advantage to Work For You
Win the SEO battle once and for all with our tech-driven strategy and implementation.
Questions to Ask Your SEO Agency or Digital Marketing Consultant
While we at Reflexive are confident that the incredibly thorough and effective services we provide are the right option for you, shopping around and comparing digital marketing service provider options is something that should always be done.
As outlined on this page, your solution provider should incorporate keyword mapping at the core of their strategic services. Below are questions you can ask any prospective SEO service provider regarding how they build, organize, implement and measure the SEO strategy process they plan to provide you.
In planning our SEO strategy, do you practice keyword mapping?
Consider: If they do not subscribe to this methodology, probe to find out why not, and be sure they have a really solid reason (Let us know what it is; we can’t think of one!).
What do you use to organize, manage, and document your keyword mapping?
Consider: It’s possible to do this in spreadsheets, but as this process becomes more complex and data-rich, the spreadsheets can become overwhelming to agency and client members alike. Furthermore, when your keyword map exists in a spreadsheet it’s disconnected from your content and your reporting.