How To Do Keyword Clustering To Upgrade Your SEO Content Strategy

Keyword clustering is the soul of an SEO content strategy. It enhances the chances of your content appearing in Google search results. It helps you find the most profitable keywords where your website can rank higher than other related keywords.

Keyword clustering allows you to filter the most useful keywords and prioritize them accordingly and exclude the irrelevant ones. If it is done properly, your website can get enormous traffic instantly, or else your entire SEO strategy might be frustrating.

But clustering keywords is not easy. Suppose you have done keyword research and you got around 100-1k keywords. It will be a difficult task to filter the best ones and find out the most profitable keywords where your SEO content strategy should be built on.

For example, let say you have an eCommerce store that sells furniture. You want your SEO experts to work on the keyword “dining table”.

When you research all the relevant keywords in Google Search Console or Keyword Planner, you see there are around 1360 keywords.

To create an effective SEO plan, you don’t want to miss any keyword that has chance to rank your content in Google SERPs or other search engine results.

But the main challenge here arises to find out the most fruitful keywords and filter out the irrelevant ones, right?

This is where keyword clustering comes in. And in this blog, we would guide you on how to do keyword clustering that upgrades your SEO content strategy.

What is Keyword Clustering?

Keyword clustering is the process of integrating relevant or similar search queries and keywords into groups that have the same buying intent.

For example, let say you have an eCommerce store that sells men’s athletic shoes, the possible ways that users may search on the Internet for your products include: 

“gym shoes for men”

“men’s baseball & softball shoes”

“black Nike tennis shoes”

In all of the above search queries, the intent is same, which is to ‘buy athletic shoes for men’. So if you create SEO content not focusing on the associated keywords or being more specific, you might miss out thousands or even millions of potential customers for your products.

And keyword clustering here makes it easier to filter the most useful keywords based on their relevance and search volume for the same user intent. There are primarily two kinds of keyword clustering:

1. Lemma-based- It finds the similarity in the meaning of phrases and their morphological matches.
2. SERP-based: It finds the similarity in the meaning of search engine results.

Why Keyword Clustering is Important?

Keyword clusters have great value in SEO content. It enables the content more relevant for link-building and on-page optimization. The best advantage of keyword clustering is that it provides you a clearer picture of what content to make and how to optimize it across the web pages, what search query to rank for, and what different segments of your website you should focus on.

By clustering or grouping keywords, you can-

1. Write content that better matches the user’s intent
2. Better understand the search intent
3. Build a content architecture or plan that supports digital marketing efforts
4. Increase the ROI from your SEO plans
5. Decrease the risk of cannibalization
6. Maximize the number of keywords to rank for top SERPs
7. Eliminate irrelevant and less beneficial keywords
8. Improve your website visibility and domain authority
9. Improve the chances of getting featured snippets 

How to Do Keyword Clustering That Upgrades Your SEO Content

Step 1: Do Initial Keyword Research

Keyword clustering begins with a list of relevant keywords. You need to collect the search queries, phrases, and keywords and sort them into topic-centered groups based on the same user’s intent.

This initial keyword research allows you to discover and know what users are searching for in your industry and niche. You have to also consider which of those keywords have more valuable and high potential of lead conversion.

To start this, first, think of the primary keyword where you want your website to rank. Then, find all the keywords relevant to the primary keyword.

Don’t just rely on Google search results, you should use keyword research tools like Google Search Console, Keyword Planner, or use Google Analytics Services and create an extensive list of 100-1k keywords which have good potential to bring customers or visitors to the site.

You should ask the following questions while choose the most suitable keywords:

• What are the primary keywords for your products and services?
• What do customers mostly look for in your niche?
• Is your website content answers user’s most common questions? 

You can arrange all these keywords in Google spreadsheet or excel with all types of keywords including long-tail keywords, short-tail keywords, phrases, pillar topics, synonyms, and related subtopics. This organized sheet will help you build multiple keyword clusters.

If you pay attention to the practices of Top SEO Agency India, they create an advanced sheet of keywords that includes various key metrics in the form of columns like monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, keyword difficulty, cost-per-click, and more.

These metrics-based columns allow them to quickly analyze and filter the most beneficial keyword for their search engine optimization.

Step 2: Recognizing Themes and Groups

A keyword cluster basically is a group of relevant keywords which have the same search or user’s intent. So, the next step would be to identify those keywords, phrases, or queries which have the same intent or theme.

For example, for the below list of keywords-

Dining table

Dining room table

Dining table set

glass dining table

folding dining table

The theme and the intent are to buy dining table. Once you have gathered the list of keywords in the sheet or any document, make sure you arrange the keyword clusters or groups based on the same intent or theme. (See in the above picture)

Step 3: Segment Keywords into Groups

Now you have a complete list of keywords related to your industry and niche, it’s time to segment or categorize the keywords into groups or clusters. Try to assign 3-5 keywords in one cluster based on their relevance and close category group to avoid difficulty in search engine optimization.

Here, you have to choose the number of keyword clusters based on how many landing pages you have on your site. Once you have determined the number of keyword clusters, segment or arrange each keyword cluster with keyword metrics that could help you filter and compare the most beneficial keywords for your business. These metrics involve: 

1. Semantic Relevance
2. Search Volume
3. Search volume over time
4. Suggested bid prices
5. Number of search results
6. AdWords competition
7. CPC
8. Organic Difficulty
9. Keyword difficulty
10. Competition
11. Google Trends
12. SERP features
13. Keyword match ratio

This is where our keyword clustering starts. When you are arranging keyword clusters with essential metrics in the sheet and assigning them with priority order.

To learn accurately, take a look at the below keyword clusters.

Keyword cluster 1

Keyword cluster 2

What factors make these good keyword clusters?

They have semantic relevance. Customers are looking for the majority of similar products.

In the first one, the primary keyword is “dining table”, which has the highest search volume, and we have grouped it with relevant keywords with higher search volume and CPC.

So based on this keyword cluster, it is clear that dining room table, dining table set, dining room set have the better conversion potential

In the second keyword cluster, the primary keyword is “online content writing tool”. In this cluster, we have grouped them search volume and competition index value.

And this keyword cluster, you can see article writer tool, article rewriting tools have high conversion potential.

Step 4: Optimize Pillar Pages for Keyword Clusters

The beauty of keyword cluster is that it gives a clear roadmap of how to create, optimize, and manage the content on your website and its pillar pages.

Keyword clusters show the main theme of your site and what niche you focus on. Therefore, you need to optimize or create landing pages which target every keyword cluster.

It means one landing page should be dedicated to the dining table (for example), and the other landing page should focus on the article writer tool.

Make sure the pillar pages of your website for the focused keyword cluster are optimized with the On-page SEO best practices. To enhance the SEO ranking probability of your pillar pages, ensure they are built on these key areas:

1. Information architecture
2. Topical depth
3. Page experience

Step 5: Create Content and Ads as per Keyword Clusters

Keyword clustering allows SEO professionals to filter out the semantics and create an SEO-friendly website structure. It helps you build a solid content authority of the pillar pages that eventually improve your website SEO ranking on Google SERPs.

When you have an extensive list of keyword clusters you have wider opportunities for creating content for a variety of topics to rank in SERPs. You can unlock new topics ideas and write a unique piece of information that meets the user’s intent.

The same applies to your Pay-Per-Click ads. Whether you create Google Ads or Bing Ads, in both ways you can optimize your ads based on keyword clusters that could bring high organic traffic to your site or campaign.

You can start a blog and write articles that focus on keyword clusters and its keyword phrases, subtopics, search queries, or other related questions to the primary keyword.

As you create more topics, these web pages will form “topic clusters” on your site and allow you for better link building. Your blog posts should be linked to the pillar pages of your website for the keywords which have high search volume.

Keyword cluster is the backbone of topic cluster and landing page creation, hence, having more keyword clusters opens more opportunities to add internal website links.

Best SEO Company in USA suggests that a website having pillar pages based on well-defined topic clusters and keyword clusters gets a better chance of user engagement and helps Google understand which web page is more important to rank in SERPs.

Conclusion

That’s it. Now you understand how keyword clustering works, it’s time to create a keyword clustering model that upgrades your overall SEO content strategy.

The best part of doing keyword cluster is that it allows you to identify the most fruitful keywords which have the better conversion potential for your business. You can customize your SEO strategy based on each keyword cluster or group.

Google uses NLP and machine learning based algorithms to find better content quality signals and recognize which web pages will better serve the user’s search intent. And this is where keyword clustering can empower you with an advanced-level SEO strategy for your website.

If you need such guidance, our SEO experts at eSearch Logix can do this for you.