How to use keyword clustering to seamlessly optimize your

SEO content

https://seoscout.com/tools/keyword-grouping

1) Cluster alongside SERP analysis

While conducting SERP analysis, the first thing to determine is the

content vertical — what’s ranking for your desired keyword? Is it
generally home pages, product pages, service pages,
collection/category pages, or articles? Whatever it is, that’s the
type of content you need to create. If Google SERPs present eight
articles and two product pages, then it’s most likely that your site
will rank with an article. If it’s ranking product pages and you’re not
selling anything, then no matter how relevant it seems, this
keyword is not for you.

Once you know what you need to create and you’ve determined
that you can create that page on your site, dig a little deeper and
find out what type of content is featured within the top pages of
websites that are most similar to yours in terms of niche and
domain authority. Think about topics covered, headings, images,
videos, and GIFs.

This investigative work provides you with an opportunity to

understand exactly what your audience wants so you can serve
them in the most meaningful way. It also ensures that you always
create content with search volume, which has the possibility of
ranking.
Pictured: an example of Google SERP for keyword: “how to
complete a Rubik’s Cube”.

2) Use keyword clustering to discover new content

opportunities

Another tactic for discovering what content to create, as well as

new content opportunities, is through the SERP features and the
prioritization of them.

Check for features and formatting such as featured snippets,

video, images, knowledge panels and “people also ask” (PAA).
PAA is especially useful; it’s a trove of questions, many of which
can be answered within your content. Other questions may need a
new article or page altogether, so you can start building out your
content architecture and forming your internal linking strategy.
Additionally, by integrating these features, you’ll be covering more
on your chosen topics, thereby increasing keyword density and
closing the gap on your competitors. Plus, your content will use the
language of your audience as opposed to your assumed
keywords.

Keyword clustering is powerful. The graph below shows one

article’s journey in Google SERPs. It ranks for 50 clustered
keywords and includes questions from PAA. This article quickly
achieved a featured snippet, image rankings, 9.37k clicks, 68.9k
impressions, 13.6% CTR and an average of six minutes spent on
the page. Oh, and this was achieved before a single website back-
linked directly to the article.

Snippet taken from Fortune and Frame’s Google Search Console

showing an article's journey in the SERPs from publication. This
particular article is about messages to write in a book (see point #3
to understand what I did with this link here).

3) Choose the most appropriate keyword for the content (then

use internal linking, naturally)

Keyword clustering presents you with opportunities you may have

otherwise overlooked. If you pull together multiple keywords that
all sit within one article or web page, you can determine the best
angle to write in order to suit your focus keyword and your online
presence.

You will have a selection of keywords and you can use their
search volume, competition and your website’s domain authority to
determine the best keyword for your site to focus on right now.

Additionally, it means that you can write meaningful anchor text as

part of your internal linking strategy. Taking the example from the
graph above (“This particular article is about messages to write in
a book gift…”), the anchor text “messages to write in a book gift” is
not the focus keyword. The focus keyword is: “what to write in a
book for a gift”, which doesn’t sound natural at all in the context
above.

Thanks to a selection of clustered keywords, an internal link using

relevant keywords, was easily slotted into a grammatically correct
sentence. Ultimately, you can fit your keywords into your content
instead of writing your content around your keywords.

4) Say goodbye to cannibalization

You could argue that you can avoid keyword

cannibalization without clustering keywords, but can you?

If you know which keywords you’ve used where, then you should,
in theory, have no (ok, there might be a little bit) keyword
cannibalization. You won’t fall for the mistake of assigning a focus
keyword to two content pieces - or more subtly - creating two
content pieces for keywords that should’ve been clustered and
covered within one article.

By clustering keywords and analyzing SERPs, you might be

surprised at what belongs within the same content piece.

Let’s take these two keywords: “Rubik’s Cube method” (260

searches/month) and “How to complete a Rubik’s Cube” (590
searches/month).

Without looking at the SERPs, one might be tempted to assign

“Rubik’s Cube method” as a focus keyword for an article that
shares different methods, whereas “‘how to complete a Rubik’s
Cube” would be a step-by-step guide. Thankfully, Google SERPs
is quite clear that these two keywords can be used—and should be
used—on the same web page to avoid cannibalization and poor
performing articles because they simply don’t cover the topics in
full.
5) Keyword clustering streamlines the SEO content plan and
improves productivity

There’s no shying away from keyword clustering. Whilst it does

add a whole lot of time to the keyword research process, it saves a
lot of time long-term. The more keyword research and clusters you
can create early on, the more it pays back in Google ranks and
seamless marketing strategy.

The main benefit is objective planning for content. If you use

keyword clustering to create a clear plan of action for SEO content
for every single page on your website and jot down suitable
content ideas for the future, you’ll be left with long-term scalability,
since you have keywords to target over time that can be scaled
indefinitely.

Your team can work from one document detailing which keywords
live where, which content needs to be created in order to achieve a
rank, and also, how that content can be repurposed for use across
the marketing landscape.

Keyword clustering is a crucial and preparatory step

You can think of keyword clustering as the preparatory work that

takes place before you execute SEO. An analogy, shared with me
by Adriana Stein, is that keyword clustering is like the shopping
and preparation of ingredients before cooking. If you skip this
crucial step you might find yourself a bit flustered later on with a
dinner that wasn’t quite what it could have been.
Ultimately, what keyword clustering does is insist that you take a
step closer to your marketing strategy. Through SERP analysis,
you will understand your customer on another level—you’ll know
the Google SERPs for your desired keywords inside and out and
exactly what you need to work towards in order to secure that
page one rank.

Then, you’ll be rewarded with a full, scalable content plan, an

entire team working in pursuit of the same content goals, and most
importantly, seamlessly optimized content!

The Advanced Guide to Keyword Clustering

Keyword Research | Content Marketing

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the
unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of
Moz.

If your goal is to grow your organic traffic, you have to think about
SEO in terms of “product/market fit.”

Keyword research is the “market” (what users are actually

searching for) and content is the “product” (what users are
consuming). The “fit” is optimization.

To grow your organic traffic, you need your content to mirror the
reality of what users are actually searching for. Your content
planning and creation, keyword mapping, and optimization should
all align with the market. This is one of the best ways to grow your
organic traffic.
Why bother with keyword grouping?

One web page can rank for multiple keywords. So why aren’t we
hyper-focused on planning and optimizing content that targets
dozens of similar and related keywords?

Why target only one keyword with one piece of content when you
can target 20?

The impact of keyword clustering to acquire more organic traffic is

not only underrated, it is largely ignored. In this guide, I'll share
with you our proprietary process we’ve pioneered for keyword
grouping so you can not only do it yourself, but you can maximize
the number of keywords your amazing content can rank for.

Here’s a real-world example of a handful of the top keywords

that this piece of content is ranking for. The full list is over 1,000
keywords.
Why should you care?

It’d be foolish to focus on only one keyword, as you’d lose out on

90%+ of the opportunity.

Here's one of my favorite examples of all of the keywords that one

piece of content could potentially target:
Let’s dive in!

Part 1: Keyword collection

Before we start grouping keywords into clusters, we first need our

dataset of keywords from which to group from.

In essence, our job in this initial phase is to find every possible

keyword. In the process of doing so, we'll also be inadvertently
getting many irrelevant keywords (thank you, Keyword Planner).
However, it's better to have many relevant and long-tail keywords
(and the ability to filter out the irrelevant ones) than to only have a
limited pool of keywords to target.

For any client project, I typically say that we'll collect anywhere
from 1,000 to 6,000 keywords. But truth be told, we've sometimes
found 10,000+ keywords, and sometimes (in the instance of a
local, niche client), we've found less than 1,000.

I recommend collecting keywords from about 8–12 different

sources. These sources are:

1. Your competitors
2. Third-party data tools (Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush,
AnswerThePublic, etc.)
3. Your existing data in Google Search Console/Google
Analytics
4. Brainstorming your own ideas and checking against them
5. Mashing up keyword combinations
 6. Autocomplete suggestions and “Searches related to” from
Google

There's no shortage of sources for keyword collection, and more

keyword research tools exist now than ever did before. Our goal
here is to be so extensive that we never have to go back and “find
more keywords” in the future — unless, of course, there's a new
topic we are targeting.

The prequel to this guide will expand upon keyword collection in

depth. For now, let’s assume that you’ve spent a few hours
collecting a long list of keywords, you have removed the
duplicates, and you have semi-reliable search volume data.

Part 2: Term analysis

Now that you have an unmanageable list of 1,000+ keywords, let’s

turn it into something useful.

We begin with term analysis. What the heck does that mean?

We break each keyword apart into its component terms that

comprise the keyword, so we can see which terms are the most
frequently occurring.

For example, the keyword: “best natural protein powder” is

comprised of 4 terms: “best,” “natural,” “protein,” and “powder.”
Once we break apart all of the keywords into their component
parts, we can more readily analyze and understand which terms
(as subcomponents of the keywords) are recurring the most in our
keyword dataset.

Here’s a sampling of 3 keywords:

 best natural protein powder

 most powerful natural anti inflammatory
 how to make natural deodorant

Take a closer look, and you’ll notice that the term “natural” occurs
in all three of these keywords. If this term is occurring very
frequently throughout our long list of keywords, it’ll be highly
important when we start grouping our keywords.
You will need a word frequency counter to give you this insight.
The ultimate free tool for this is Write Words’ Word Frequency
Counter. It’s magical.

Paste in your list of keywords, click submit, and you'll get

something like this:

Copy and paste your list of recurring terms into a spreadsheet.

You can obviously remove prepositions and terms like “is,” “for,”
and “to.”

You don’t always get the most value by just looking at individual
terms. Sometimes a two-word or three-word phrase gives you
insights you wouldn’t have otherwise. In this example, you see the
terms “milk” and “almond” appearing, but it turns out that this is
actually part of the phrase “almond milk.”

To gather these insights, use the Phrase Frequency Counter from

WriteWords and repeat the process for phrases that have two,
three, four, five, and six terms in them. Paste all of this data into
your spreadsheet too.
A two-word phrase that occurs more frequently than a one-word
phrase is an indicator of its significance. To account for this, I
use the COUNTA function in Google Sheets to show me the
number of terms in a phrase:

=COUNTA(SPLIT(B2," "))
Now we can look at our keyword data with a second dimension:
not only the number of times a term or phrase occurs, but also how
many words are in that phrase.

Finally, to give more weighting to phrases that recur less frequently

but have more terms in them, I put an exponent on the number of
terms with a basic formula:

=(C4^2)*A4

In other words, take the number of terms and raise it to a power,

and then multiply that by the frequency of its occurrence. All this
does is give more weighting to the fact that a two-word phrase that
occurs less frequently is still more important than a one-word
phrase that might occur more frequently.

As I never know just the right power to raise it to, I test several and
keep re-sorting the sheet to try to find the most important terms
and phrases in the sheet.

When you look at this now, you can already see patterns start to
emerge and you're already beginning to understand your
searchers better.

In this example dataset, we are going from a list of 10k+ keywords

to an analysis of terms and phrases to understand what people are
really asking. For example, “what is the best” and “where can i
buy” are phrases we can absolutely understand searchers using.
I mark off the important terms or phrases. I try to keep this number
to under 50 and to a maximum of around 75; otherwise, grouping
will get hairy in Part 5.

Part 3: Hot words

What are hot words?

Hot words are the terms or phrases from that last section that we
have deemed to be the most important. We've explained hot words
in greater depth here.

Why are hot words important?

We explain:

This exercise provides us with a handful of the most

relevant and important terms and phrases for traffic
and relevancy, which can then be used to create the
best content strategies — content that will rank highly
and, in turn, help us reap traffic rewards for your site.
When developing your hot words list, we identify the
highest frequency and most relevant terms from a large
range of keywords used by several of your highest-
performing competitors to generate their traffic, and
these become “hot words.”

When working with a client (or doing this for yourself), there are
generally 3 questions we want answered for each hot word:

1. Which of these terms are the most important for your

business? (0–10)
2. Which of these terms are negative keywords (we want to
ignore or avoid)?
3. Any other feedback about qualified or high-intent keywords?

We narrow down the list, removing any negative keywords or

keywords that are not really important for the website.

Once we have our final list of hot words, we organize them into
broad topic groups like this:
The different colors have no meaning, but just help to keep it
visually organized for when we group them.

One important thing to note is that word stems play an important

part here.

For example, consider that all of these words below have the same
underlying relevance and meaning:

 blog
 blogs
 blogger
 bloggers
 blogging
Therefore, when we're grouping keywords, to consider “blog” and
“blogging” and “bloggers” as part of the same cluster, we'll need to
use the word stem of “blog” for all of them. Word stems are our
best friend when grouping. Synonyms can be organized in a
similar way, which are basically two different ways of saying the
same thing (and the same user intent) such as “build” and “create”
or “search” and “look for.”

Part 4: Preparation for keyword grouping

Now we're going to get ourselves set up for our Herculean task of
clustering.

To start, copy your list of hot words and transpose them

horizontally across a row.

List your keywords in the first column.

Now, the real magic begins.

After much research and noodling around, I discovered the

function in Google Sheets that tells us whether a stem or term is in
a keyword or not. It uses RegEx:

=IF(RegExMatch(A5,"health"),"YES","NO")

This simply tells us whether this word stem or word is in that

keyword or not. You have to individually set the term for each
column to get your “YES” or “NO” answer. I then drag this formula
down to all of the rows to get all of the YES/NO answers. Google
Sheets often takes a minute or so to process all of this data.

Next, we have to “hard code” these formulas so we can remove

the NOs and be left with only a YES if that terms exists in that
keyword.

Copy all of the data and “Paste values only.”

Now, use “Find and replace” to remove all of the NOs.

What you're left with is nothing short of a work of art. You now
have the most powerful way to group your keywords. Let the
grouping begin!
Part 5: Keyword grouping

At this point, you're now set up for keyword clustering success.

This part is half art, half science. No wait, I take that back. To do
this part right, you need:

 A deep understanding of who you're targeting, why they're

important to the business, user intent, and relevance
 Good judgment to make tradeoffs when breaking keywords
apart into groups
 Good intuition
This is one of the hardest parts for me to train anyone to do. It
comes with experience.

At the top of the sheet, I use the COUNTA function to show me

how many times this word step has been found in our keyword set:

=COUNTA(C3:C10000)

This is important because as a general rule, it's best to start with

the most niche topics that have the least overlap with other topics.
If you start too broadly, your keywords will overlap with other
keyword groups and you'll have a hard time segmenting them into
meaningful groups. Start with the most narrow and specific groups
first.

To begin, you want to sort the sheet by word stem.

The word stems that occur only a handful of times won’t have a
large amount of overlap. So I start by sorting the sheet by that
column, and copying and pasting those keywords into their own
new tab.

Now you have your first keyword group!

Here's a first group example: the “matcha” group. This can be its
own project in its own right: for instance, if a website was all about
matcha tea and there were other tangentially related keywords.
As we continue breaking apart one keyword group and then
another, by the end we're left with many different keyword groups.
If the groups you've arrived at are too broad, you can subdivide
them even more into narrower keyword subgroups for more
focused content pieces. You can follow the same process for this
broad keyword group, and make it a microcosm of the same
process of dividing the keywords into smaller groups based on
word stems.

We can create an overview of the groups to see the volume and

topical opportunities from a high level.
We want to not only consider search volume, but ideally also
intent, competitiveness, and so forth.

Voilà!

You've successfully taken a list of thousands of keywords and

grouped them into relevant keyword groups.

Wait, why did we do all of this hard work again?

Now you can finally attain that “product/market fit” we talked about.
It’s magical.

You can take each keyword group and create a piece of optimized
content around it, targeting dozens of keywords, exponentially
raising your potential to acquire more organic traffic. Boo yah!
All done. Now what?

Now the real fun begins. You can start planning out new content
that you never knew you needed to create. Alternatively, you can
map your keyword groups (and subgroups) to existing pages on
your website and add in keywords and optimizations to the header
tags, body text, and so forth for all those long-tail keywords you
had ignored.

Keyword grouping is underrated, overlooked, and ignored at large.

It creates a massive new opportunity to optimize for terms where
none existed. Sometimes it's just adding one phrase or a few
sentences targeting a long-tail keyword here and there that will
bring in that incremental search traffic for your site. Do this dozens
of times and you will keep getting incremental increases in your
organic traffic.

What do you think?

Leave a comment below and let me know your take on keyword

clustering.

Need a hand? Just give me a shout, I’m happy to help.