What is Keyword Clustering – Advanced Guide

What is Keyword Clustering - Advanced Guide 3

In order to improve your organic traffic, you have to imagine SEO in terms of market and product. Here, we consider the market as “keyword research” and product as the “content”. A product will fit into the market with proper optimization.

The best way to improve your organic traffic is to create a unique content that the user will search for. Your content, right use of keywords, and optimization must go parallel with the market.  

Why keyword grouping is important?

It is not any hard and fast rule to optimize a content for one single keyword. You can use groups of keywords in your content wisely. Target on various combinations of keywords when you create a content.

The importance of keyword clustering is usually underrated. This guide is dedicated to explaining why keyword grouping should not be ignored if you truly want to rank high on a SERP. By the end of this guide, you will be able to efficiently use the maximum number of keyword combinations your content can rank for.

advanced guide to keyword clustering

Let us now see how we should efficiently do keyword clustering!

1)  Collect your main keywords

Before you start to prepare your group of keywords, you must prepare a list of all your important keywords. This is the initial phase where you have to find all the possible keywords that can help to increase the rank of your content.  

When you have your keyword list ready, filter it. Any keyword generating tool you use will give you a long list of keywords. It is your first priority to remove any unnecessary keywords. It will be better if you keep long tail keywords rather than a huge list of limited keywords. The best way to collect keywords for your client is to rely on some trusted sources. These sources are-

  1. Competitor keywords
  2. Keyword tools like Moz, Semrush, Ahrefs and more
  3. Brainstorming and listing keywords manually
  4. Mixing up keyword combinations
  5. Takes an idea from autocomplete suggestion from Google search tab

There are plenty of tools to get keywords for your content. You must collect a sufficient number of keywords so that you do not have to repeat this step at any point.

2) Analyze your keywords

By analyzing your keywords here we mean that break the long keywords word by word. Then find out which words are repeating more than once in your keyword list.

For example, let us take the keyword- best car care tips

The keyword is comprised of 4 basic terms “best” “car” “ care” “tips”. We can now easily analyze which of the given words are repeating in our list of keywords. Some example of keyword grouping with these terms can be-

  • general car maintenance tips
  • new car care tips
  • car maintenance tips for summer and more.

In the given 3 keyword groups, you will see that the term “car” is found in all 3. You can use word frequency counter tool to figure out which term is occurring how many times.

Just put your keywords in the text box of the given tool and click on submit. You will get the frequency count of all your terms in the input keywords. The result would be something like this as given in the below image.

keyword grouping

Similarly, you can also find out that which phrases are appearing more than once in your list with a phrase frequency counter tool.

3) Hot Words

If we talk in simple terms, hot words are the words that occur the most or have the maximum frequency. More frequency means that they have more importance.

These terms are important from the site traffic and relevancy point of view. These keywords can be very helpful in creating a unique content that will rank good on search engines. And good content means more site traffic.

When you figure out the best hot words for your client, you must ask these 3 questions to yourself-

  • Which hot words are most important for the business
  • What terms can be avoided
  • Any other specific requirements of keywords by the client

When you make a list of hot words, you should also focus on the word stem. We will understand the word stem with the following example.

Let us consider these 5 words- blog, blogs, blogger, bloggers, blogging

When you group the keywords, these words can be considered as a part of same word stem i.e. blog. Similarly, you can also groups synonyms in the same manner as they will have the same meaning.

4) Prepare your keyword groups

Now that you have your hot words and list of keywords ready, prepare a spreadsheet. Write down your hot words in a row and keywords in a column. The sheet would look something like this-

hot words
Image Source: Moz

 

With the help of a function, you can find out a word stem has been used in a keyword or not. The function is- IF(RegExMatch(A5,”health”),”YES”,”NO”)

In this formula, you will have to set up terms for every column to get an answer in yes or no. You can simply drag this formula to different rows to get your answer for each term.

After this, you have to hard code your formula so that you are left only with the “yes” options. For this, copy all the resulting data and while pasting choose “paste values only”. Then find and replace all the “No”. You are now left with only the “yes” options.

what is keyword clustering              Image Source: Moz

5) Keyword Grouping

This is the last and most important step of clustering your keywords. Before you start with this step, you must have a proper understanding of these points-

  • Who is your target audience, why are they your target audience and what is the user intention & relevancy.
  • Should be able to efficiently distinguish between the keywords that are needed and the ones which can be avoided.
  • Good intuition skills

Now at the top of the sheet, apply the COUNTA function to find the number of times the word steps repeats in the keyword list. The function is =COUNTA(C3:C10000)

This way you will get the best keywords from your niche. If you begin with taking broader keywords you will waste a lot of time in refining them.

First, you have to sort your excel sheet in reference to the word stem. The stem that occurs a few times in your sheet will not have much overlapping. Copy and paste that column of keywords on a fresh sheet. This is your first keyword group. Continue with the same step for every keyword group. In the end, you will be left with your list of best keyword groups.

Now you can take each of your keyword group and prepare a fresh and unique content with it. Plan a content with these top rating keywords. You can also use these keywords in your existing web pages or blogs and articles. You can optimize the website by using these keywords in the header tags, image alt tags, meta tags, page urls and more.