Keyword clustering tools group keywords with the same or similar intent. This makes it easier to take action on your keyword research because it tells you which keywords to target on the same page.
Unfortunately, most keyword clustering tools aren’t exactly fast…
For example, I asked a popular keyword clustering tool to cluster 4,703 keywords. It took 51 minutes! That’s a long time to wait!
Fortunately, you can group keywords much more quickly in Keyword Explorer.
Instant clustering works by grouping keywords together using a proprietary metric in Ahrefs called Main topic. To get this metric, let’s take page no. 1 ranking for your keyword and we find the keyword responsible for sending the most traffic to that page.
Example
The page at the top of the ranking for “best drip coffee maker” is from Wirecutter:
The same page ranks first in the “best thermal carafe coffee maker” ranking…
…and for the “best filter coffee machine”:
For this reason, all three keywords have the same main topic (“best drip coffee maker”) and fall into the same cluster:
It’s clearly possible to rank higher for all the keywords in the cluster with just one page because that’s exactly what the Wirecutter page does.
This clustering method is faster than many other keyword clustering tools because, unlike them, we don’t have to do a lot of calculations on the fly to group keywords. We already have Parents’ arguments stored.
Simply enter your broad search or keyword list and click the “Clusters by Top Topic” tab in the file Overview or a keyword ideas report:
You’ll see your keywords clustered by Parent Topic and sorted by cluster volume.
To view the keywords in a cluster and their metrics, press the slider in the Keywords column:
Let’s go into more detail for a few different scenarios.
To group an existing list of keywords…
Paste your list of up to 10,000 keywords, hit search, and click the “Clusters by Top Topic” tab in the Overview relationship. That’s all!
To group a new keyword list…
Enter a few initial keywords, go to one of the keyword ideas reports (for example, Matching Terms), then select the “Clusters by Top Topic” tab to group all your keyword ideas.
If you want to be more selective, use filters to refine your search and add keyword ideas you like to a keyword list.
If you then select this list of keyword lists on the left and hit the “Clusters by Top Topic” tab, it will group your list:
To group your competitor’s keywords…
Enter a competitor’s domain in Site Explorer, go to Organic keywords reports and export data.
Side note.
If your competitor ranks for over 10,000 keywords, you will need to use filters to refine the report before exporting it. This is because 10,000 is the maximum number of keywords you can paste into Keyword Explorer, which is the next step.
Next, paste the exported keywords into Keyword Explorer, then select the “Clusters by Top Topic” tab in the Overview report.
Do you want to group more than 10,000 competitor keywords?
You can’t do this via the parent topic in Ahrefs yet, but the Top Pages report in Site Explorer does something very similar. It shows you the top pages based on estimated traffic and the keyword that sends the most traffic to the page (which is often a good indicator of the overall topic).
You can also see all the keywords the page ranks for by pressing the slider:
If your goal is to find topic ideas from your competitors, this report is a gold mine.
Term clustering lets you group keywords based on the words or phrases they contain rather than intent. It’s useful for understanding trends, finding niches, and grouping keywords into topical segments so you can create related content in batches.
To do this in Ahrefs, simply click on the “Term Clusters” tab in the Overview or Keyword Ideas report.
For example, if you enter “notion” as a seed keyword and cluster by terms, you’ll see that one of the term clusters is “model”:
This cluster contains 5,098 keywords with a global combined search volume of 257,000.
If you press the slider to reveal keywords, you’ll see all kinds of Notion templates that people are looking for, like:
- concept budget template
- knowledge calendar template
- concept project management template
- Concept school template
- knowledge diary template
- training model concept
- concept travel template
Given the search traffic potential here, this could be a great niche for a new website.
Why should you group keywords?
Keyword clustering speeds up content production by turning keywords into topics that writers can immediately start working on. It also helps you produce more complete content, as keywords in clusters often represent important subtopics.
What is the best keyword clustering tool?
Ahrefs is the best keyword clustering tool if you are looking to group keywords quickly. It only takes a few seconds, while other tools can often take over an hour just to group a few thousand keywords.
What is the disadvantage of using Keyword Explorer as a keyword clustering tool?
Keyword Explorer is probably less accurate than some keyword clustering tools because it groups by main topic. This means we judge keyword similarity based on the top result, not the entire SERP (like some other tools do). But that’s also why it’s so fast!
Where can I find more information about keyword clustering?
Read our guide to keyword clustering. It delves into how to do this and the advantages and disadvantages of clustering.