In this article, I’m gonna be sharing with you a few different tips and tricks for how you can cluster your keywords more quickly using free and paid tools.
Why is keyword clustering important?
Before we dig into the tools for today though, it’s really important for you to understand why you should even cluster your keywords in the first. The reason why you want to create keyword clusters or topic clusters is because it can be a great way for you to approach building your website since you’re going to demonstrate your overall knowledge and authority on that particular topic to the search engine that you’re looking to rank on.
If you were only, for example, to write a singular blog post on a particular topic and not write all the A through Zs around that particular topic, well then the website that does do the A through Z sort of approach is going to typically outrank you, and that’s just simply because they have a more holistic view around the topic or the niche that your website is focused on.
And so that’s why topic clusters are typically advocated for among SEOs is because it just helps give contextual relevance to the authority and the expertise of your respective website. In order to figure that out, though, sometimes you might be working in a niche that you don’t actually have all that much information on or previous knowledge on, and as a result, knowing how to cluster these can be a little confusing.
Keyword clustering using SEMRush
Well, the best way that I typically advise people to learn how to cluster different keywords in their niche is by using SEMRush’s topic research tool. This is a section of SEMRush that is typically used a little bit less frequently to the organic research sections. So let’s go ahead and jump into SEMRush and I’ll show you around in terms of how you can get to the topic research tool.
The first thing we’re gonna do in SEMRush is we’re gonna go ahead and go into the Keyword Magic tool and input in the keyword that we are interested in. In my last article, I shared with you an exploration of the Instant Pot niche, so we’re gonna continue working on that sort of topic here. From here, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go ahead and start to look for some lower competition keywords. So this is where I’m gonna cap it at around 30 in keyword difficulty, as well as potentially set up some advanced filters, like looking for things where it’s either at least three words or more.
And just so that I can start to cut down on the number of keywords that I have here. What I’m also gonna do is I’m gonna set a cap in terms of upper limit, just so that I can start to understand some of these lower hanging fruit opportunities out there. When I’ve done that, you can see that I’ve now filtered down to about 4,200 keywords.
And then what I’m gonna do as well is maybe I’m gonna go ahead and make sure that I am just covering informational intent. So when I do that, I’m now under 4,000 keywords, and what I can do is I can see how on the left hand side, SEMRush has already started to kind of classify things for me by the commonalities in some of these keyword phrases, there’s things like a thing around rice, a thing around beans, potatoes.
And so one idea that comes to mind in terms of topic clusters is I could create different categories on my Instant Pot website around bean recipes, rice recipes, potato recipes, and so on. That would certainly be a viable way in terms of how I could organize all of my content. But what I can also do is I can potentially see whether or not there are certain clusters even within these clusters.
And the best way that I can do that is I can go ahead and export these out and then plug them into some other free tools to see how they might want to think about this particular content. In this case, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go ahead and export out the chicken keywords and see whether or not there’s potentially different clusters that come to mind when I pull these keywords out. So I’m gonna go ahead and export that as an Excel S file.
Keyword clustering using SEO Scout
And then from here you’re gonna go ahead and go into Google and look for seoscout.com’s free keyword grouping and clustering tool. And then what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna open up your Excel sheet, which has all of your different keyword ideas that you pulled out here and just copy that and then paste them into this respective dropdown. And when you do that, what you’ll see is that if you want to go ahead and also tell it what your niche is, now you can see how it has already gone ahead and categorized things for you.
So now you can see how immediately, once I pasted this in, it started to think about the relationships between different keywords and now I have a variety of different clusters. We have things that we could create under chicken pasta. We have things around chicken tacos. We have things around chicken feet, chicken pie, chicken soup. We even have things around different area, regional versions of chicken, as well as things like chowder, garlic powder and so on.
And so what this tool does is it essentially takes a raw list of keywords that you might have pulled out of a SEMRush or out of a Keywords Everywhere, and it helps you try to understand how you might want to put these together into different clusters. And that’s pretty much all there is to it.
Once you put it into the SEO Scout tool, it’s gonna auto categorize these, and then you can continue doing that for all the different keyword clusters that may have come out from the keyword magic tool. So that’s method number one, which is to combine SEMRush along with SEO Scout.
Keyword clustering using People Also Ask or Answer Socrates
But the second method that you might want to use in combination is using a tool like People Also Ask or Answer Socrates. I’ve covered Answer Socrates in the past, but I’ll give you a quick rundown of how I might use this in this example, just so that you can kind of see how I complement the different methods that I’m showing you in today’s video.
All right, so what I can do is I can hop into answer Socrates and go ahead and just type in instant pot. When I do that, this is the highest level way that I could think about this particular problem. But essentially what it’s doing is it’s going through all of the autocompletes in Google and asking some core question stems as well as categorizing things based off different prepositions comparisons and A through Z.
And so this can be really useful when just trying to get a high-level understanding of a niche. But you can also do this for more targeted searches. For example, like the one that I did around chicken. So let’s say, for example, I don’t know exactly what the middle keyword is. But I know that I want to find keywords related to Instant Pot and chicken because that was kind of the category that I exported out of SEMRush.
Well then what I can do from here is I can just go ahead and scroll through here and I can look through these keywords to see whether or not there are particular patterns or themes that might come to mind. Please note that Answer Socrates is not gonna do nearly as good of a job in terms of clustering these keywords, but the reason why I like to use this sort of method in combination with SEO Scout or some other, is because it essentially just makes sure that I’m being completely exhaustive in the different ways that I’m thinking about the topic that I’m looking to write about. And from here, what you can see is that you can start to see some commonalities that might emerge in particular categories.
Keyword clustering using SEODatabiz
The final tool that I’ll share with you today that can be useful in topic clustering is SEODataviz. If you go to a SEODataviz, what you can do is you can see how they visualize the different keywords related to the niche that you’re looking at, and then see whether or not there’s some commonalities in the ways that you might be thinking about it from the prior two methods.
All right, so jumping right in. You can see here what I’ve done in SEODataviz. I’ve put in instant pots. I’m actually gonna change this up. I’m gonna put instant pot and then chicken. Just so that I can see what happens when I do that. And once I’ve done that, it’s gonna update the results here. And what I’m looking for is I’m looking for the bottom sections to see how they might be grouping some of the different things here.
So you can see here that this is pretty much the network of related phrases to instant pot chicken that they came up with. There’s things around thighs, there’s things about rice, there’s things around wings, soup as well as chicken breasts and chicken tacos and so on. So this is pretty similar to what SEO Scout was doing in that it’s essentially thinking about all the different ways that things might be connected and the subcategories that you might be able to factor in, when it comes to creating your content around instant pot and chicken recipes.
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