What Is Keyword Grouping And How To Do It The Right Way

Last Updated on 4 months by Christopher Jan Benitez

By now, you should know that you can rank for more than one keyword for your blog post or web page.

The problem is, most of the time, people optimize their content using a focus keyword.

This is not wrong by any means. However, you don’t get to maximize the organic traffic potential of your page if you don’t optimize it for related terms.

This is where keyword grouping, or keyword clustering, comes to the rescue.

In this post, I will discuss keyword grouping and its benefits. Also, I will show you how you can group your search queries in different ways.

In the end, you should be able to do keyword grouping to help your blog post rank for multiple keywords on SERPs.

What is keyword grouping?

The keyword grouper method is the process of researching a list of keywords and grouping search terms closely related to one another. They help you build a silo that covers different user intent for each search term in the cluster.

Most conduct keyword research by finding a search term with a high search volume that they will use to optimize the content. There are different tools you can use for this.

With keyword grouping, you can unearth thousands of keywords and organize them into keyword groups.

Benefits of a keyword group

So, what’s the big deal with coming up with keyword clusters?

Below are its advantages:

Increase organic traffic

By coming up with clusters of keywords, you can optimize for them in your content.

Since they are related to your target keyword, you shouldn’t have any problem mentioning them in the post. Simply use them as synonyms to your main keyword to mix things up.

By doing so, you increase your chances of ranking for your target keyword on search results and closely related keywords on search results.

And by ranking on top of search engine results for all those keywords in a single page, you can increase traffic coming from search engines!

Organize your content structure

Aside from using a keyword group for a single page, you can use the keywords to create a silo in your website.

A silo is a structure where a category or a folder in a website contains pages related to the topic of the category.

For example, if the category is “running shoes,” then the pages in it can optimize for the following keywords:

  • Running shoes for men
  • Best running shoes in 2020
  • Nike running shoes

Basically, keyword groups can help you come up with relevant content ideas for categories in your site.

By doing so, you create semantically relevant content about a topic, which plays a big role in your content marketing strategy.

Focus on topics, not keywords

In relation to the benefit above, keyword grouping allows you to approach your site as a source of information about a topic.

Again, if your website is about running shoes, creating content about woodworking for it doesn’t make sense.

Even if the search terms for woodworking have generally higher quality scores (high search volume and low difficulty), it adds nothing to the topic of your website.

So, if your visitors see content optimized for irrelevant keywords, expect them to leave right away.

It’s about time webmasters create topically relevant content instead of chasing profitable keywords left and right. 

This way, they create authority and credibility for your website about their topic.

Start keyword grouping with SE Ranking!

If you want to make the most out of keyword grouping, use SE Ranking. It’s an all-in-one SEO platform that lets you conduct keyword research, competitor analysis, monitor website changes, and more. Below, you will see how you can effectively use SE Ranking to cluster keywords. But if you want to learn more about the tool, check out the SE Ranking review I wrote to shows how powerful the tool is.

How to use Keyword Planner for creating keyword groups

You can use tools like Long Tail Pro if you want a paid tool to help you find keyword ideas. But Google Keyword Planner is a free keyword tool mainly used for Google Ads and PPC.

For SEO, however, you can use it to find keyword suggestions for building your keyword strategy.

But for the purpose of this post, you can use Keyword Planner as a keyword grouping tool to help you cluster related keywords together.

If you have a Google account, login from Google Adwords to access the tool.

Once in, type in your topic on the text bar.

keyword planner - discover new keywords

The tool will then generate keyword ideas that you can include in your campaign.

From the Keyword ideas page, click on Grouped ideas on the sidebar.

keyword planner - grouped ideas

It will show you the keywords organized into groups.

keyword planner - grouped ideas results

To view the keywords for each group, click on the arrow button to show them.

From here, you can download the keywords ideas and organize them further manually onto a spreadsheet.

keyword planner - download keyword ideas

Now, using the Keyword Planner is the easiest and simplest way to group your keywords. It also doesn’t provide you with the most value.

For one, the tool doesn’t tell you how it grouped the keywords together (more on this later).

It also lacks features to help you analyze the clusters properly.

So while Keyword Planner is good enough to help you group keywords together, it’s not useful enough.

SE Ranking is an all-inclusive SEO tool that helps you rank your websites higher on organic search. You can use its features like link building, competitor analysis, PPC keyword research, and more to formulate your SEO strategy.

But its keyword grouper feature lets you come up with keyword lists for optimizing your websites with topically relevant keywords.

SE Ranking is a paid search marketing tool but you can sign up for a 14-day free trial to test its features.

But before you can use its keyword grouper feature, you must upload a number of keywords manually to the tool.

You can use the keywords you downloaded from the Google Adwords tool.

While they are already clustered together, it doesn’t hurt to run them again using SE Ranking. You could get different and possibly better results in the process.

Or you can also use SE Ranking’s keyword tool to find ideas and suggestions for your topic. I personally feel it’s one of the better keyword research tools in the market.

To begin, go to Tools > Keyword Suggestions from the menu.

Then enter your topic on the text bar. Change the source and country database if necessary before hitting “Start search.”

what is keyword grouping - se ranking - keyword suggestions

On the overview page, scroll down until you reach the Similar keywords section. Click on View detailed results to see the entire list of keywords.

se ranking - similar keywords

From here, click on the Export button and choose .csv or .xlsx format to download the list.

export similar keywords from se ranking

Once you have downloaded the file, go back to the dashboard and go to Tools > Keyword Grouper.

keyword grouper se ranking

Next, enter the title of the keyword group and change the settings as you see fit.

keyword grouper search engine settings

Next, and perhaps its best feature, is the ability to organize the keywords according to accuracy and method.

keyword grouping accuracy and method

If you want to create accurate keyword groups, you need to set it at a higher setting.

What happens is the tool will be stricter regarding clustering keywords. 

Therefore, the higher the accuracy is, the fewer search queries there will be in each group.

Regarding the method of grouping, choose between soft and hard.

In a nutshell, the soft method groups together a much larger set of keywords. However, there’s a chance that each group will have irrelevant keywords in there.

The hard method clusters fewer keywords compared to the soft method. But there’s a low chance you will see unrelated search queries in each group.

keyword grouper search volume checker upload

After choosing the settings, confirm if you want to include the search volume of each keyword. Then upload the file where your keywords are.

Also, you must understand that keyword grouping is an on-demand SE Ranking service. This means it’s not part of your subscription of the tool.

Each keyword query check costs $0.004, while the search volume check is at $0.005.

Once you start grouping the keywords, wait for a couple of minutes. The length of time clustering your keywords depends on how many you uploaded.

The keyword group on SE Ranking should look like this:

keywords grouping results in Google USA

If you expand the group, you will see the keywords included, their search volume, the Top 10 matching URLs, and the highlighted keywords on the top 10 results.

keyword group details

You can export the groups and explore each of them more in detail from a spreadsheet.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is keyword grouping in SEO?

Keyword grouping is an effective method for optimizing content. The process involves making clusters of related keywords and using those groups to create posts or pages optimized with several terms from a particular keyword group.

What is keyword with example?

In SEO, a keyword is the term that people use to search for products and services online. For example, if I want to search for Nike basketball shoes, I type in “adidas basketball shoes” or “best Nike basketball shoes for guards.” Keywords are part of an optimization strategy called on-page SEO.

How do you organize keywords?

You can organize content according to their intent. Some people use keywords to learn more about a specific topic (informational), while others type in keywords with the intent of purchasing something (commercial and transactional). Organizing keywords according to these categories allows you to create topically relevant content for each group.

How do you do keyword clustering?

It would be best if you researched for keywords that are closely related to your niche or topic. From here, you can group them together according to their respective variants, subtopics, and others.

Conclusion

Grouping keywords is not really reinventing the wheel. However, the best SEO strategies happen to be the simplest.

In this case, clustering your keywords is one of the easiest ways to organize your content according to topic. 

This way, you can rank your pages for multiple keywords at the same time. You also create semantically relevant content based on keywords.

Google Keyword Planner is a great place to start keyword grouping. But if you want a leg up on the competition, try out SE Ranking.