How to Do Keyword Clustering

Keyword clustering helps SEOs and content marketers to transform keyword lists into content and create actionable strategies from lists of keywords. This article will help you understand how to do keyword clustering and create a content strategy to effectively target the keywords you want to rank for.

What is Keyword Clustering

Keyword clustering is the process of grouping keywords which mean the same thing together so that they can be targeted in a single piece of content. While the concept of clustering related keywords together is straightforward, in practice this is nuanced. 

Related: What is Keyword Clustering [deep dive]

How to do Keyword Clustering (Manually)

While there are keyword clustering tools available, understanding how to do keyword clustering manually is important to truly understanding your content marketing strategy. 

1. Create Your Keyword List

The first step in the keyword clustering process is to create a keyword list. To do this, you can use your favorite keyword research tool (ahrefs, semrush, Google Search Console, Conductor, Bright Edge, etc). 

Everyone has their own process for creating a target keyword list but typically the two bottoms up approaches to creating a keyword list are to:

• Create a gap analysis – looking at where your competitor ranks but you do not 
• Doing a keyword deep dive – looking at all the keyword phrases that include a particular keyword phrase (ex: enter “auto insurance” into your favorite keyword research tool and identify all the matching terms)

The goal of this step is to create a comprehensive keyword list of all the keywords with search volume that users are searching for in search engines.

2. Group Keywords Into Topics

Once you have your keyword list, the goal is to group these related keywords into topics which can be effectively targeted in a single piece of content. There are multiple ways to do this, the best way to do this is to use the URL overlap method where you group keywords together when they share a certain number of URLs in common.

If you prefer very focused topic clusters, using six common URLs is a good starting point. If you have a lot of topical authority and prefer to create broader clusters with the ability to rank for a lot of mid and long-tail keywords, then 4 common URLs is a great starting point.

3. Identify Content Opportunities & Keyword Gaps

Once you have your keywords grouped into topics, it’s important to understand where your opportunities are. This is best done by looking at the individual keywords in your keyword and topic list and identifying how well you perform for these keywords. 

It will be most efficient to focus most of your efforts on keywords where you currently report a  performance that is not on page 1. 

4. Review Intent & Create Strategy

Once you’ve identified a) your topics and b) which topics you do not perform well for you can move to create a content marketing strategy. 

The first step is to review your refined list of topics and assign an intent to each topic. Generally intent can fall into one of the following groups:

• Informational (article format)
• Commerce (category or product detail page)
• Local result (local business, maps result)
• Images (image based results)
• Videos (video based results)
• Branded (results primarily from a brand)
• News (primarily news / fresh results)
• Mixed intent (when Google is unsure they will show different formats)

Once you have assigned an intent to each topic, you can create a plan to create content in the appropriate format to target each keyword cluster.

5. Create & Optimize your content

After you’ve determined the intent and format for each keyword, you can create a content brief (if the format is article based) or creating project requirements to develop an appropriate page type for your new content. Once you’ve gotten your draft of your content back or have a concept for a page type created, you can use a tool like Content Harmony to optimize your content and make sure that Google finds the entities and topics that search engines expect to find in your content.

Tools for Keyword Clustering

The process of how to do keyword clustering that we just went through is really involved – there are tools such as Asymmetric Data that you can use to speed up the tedious parts of the keyword clustering process.

To use Asymmetric Data:

1. Compile a keyword research list as you would normally generate a list of keywords to target. The benefit of using a tool like Asymmetric Data is that it allows you to scale and do a larger, bottoms up analysis. While you might only be able to manage 1 or 2 keywords per page (primary keywords) when you are manually clustering keywords, Asymmetric Data will let you work off hundreds of thousands of keywords to more accurately and efficiently understand the content opportunity.
2. After you’ve created a target keyword list, create a new keyword clustering project in Asymmetric Data. Specify how many URLs you’d like to define a cluster (6 shared URLs between keywords is a great starting point. If you have a lot of authority and prefer broader clusters, 4 common URLs is a good place to start).
3. We’ll email you a report that looks like this example when your project is complete. The report will not only group together semantically related keywords, but it will also tell you the estimated opportunity associated with each cluster.
4. Begin creating briefs and the content creation process.

FAQs

What tool is used for keyword clustering?

Asymmetric Data can be used to take a list of keywords and cluster them into a group of topics that can be used to direct a content marketing plan.

What is a cluster in SEO?

A cluster in SEO is a group of keywords that are semantically related and can be targeted in a single piece of content.

How to do keyword grouping?

The best way to do keyword grouping is to look at the search results for each keyword and group keywords together when there are multiple shared URLs between keywords.