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What Are the Best Keyword Grouping and Clustering Tools?

Written by James Parsons • Updated June 29, 2024

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Using a Keyword Grouping Tool

One of the best modern techniques in content marketing is the concept of content clustering. Content clustering is a multifaceted tool and process:

  • It helps you brainstorm topic ideas in groups.
  • It helps you build a robust backlink profile.
  • It helps you dig deep into different aspects of a topic.
  • It helps you ensure total coverage of a topic across your site.
  • It helps position you as an authority on the subject.

Content clustering, keyword grouping, and similar concepts all work to build your SEO and content marketing position by building your authority in a space. Think of it as a way to organize and interlink your content in relational groups.

The idea is that you take a single core topic – something like “Inbound Lead Generation” – and use that as your core topic. One blog post likely isn’t going to rank for that keyword, right? Even a huge Ultimate Guide isn’t going to outperform entire websites and apps dedicated to the concept. Fortunately, it’s a large, top-level keyword, which means there are dozens of sub-topics you can identify and cover in content.

What you do is create a pillar page with as much information as you can about the overall subject. For each sub-topic, you cover it in broad strokes, but you don’t dig deep into it. For those sub-topics, you create individual pieces of content. The pillar page links to the deeper content, and the deeper content links back to the pillar. It’s a cohesive organizational structure built around learning about the central topic.

One of the biggest examples of a huge content cluster is the Backlinko list of Google Search Ranking Factors. The core page itself is a massive pillar page, and each of the individual factors it discusses is only given anywhere from 20-30 words to a couple of paragraphs. But, critically, most of them have links to more detailed pages that dig into that niche topic.

Two factors make this less of a good example of a content cluster. The first is that it’s more concerned with being an ultimate resource, so many of the links are to non-Backlinko content. This isn’t a bad thing – obviously, the post performs very well – but it means it doesn’t quite serve the same purpose. The second is that it’s not as narrowly focused as a good content cluster and pillar group. A good cluster usually only has around 15-20 subtopic pages, so it’s generally a good deal narrower, and it’s often focused on a specific stage of the user journey or through another organizational method, so there’s more to it than just topic relationships.

It’s easy to conceptualize but frequently hard to actually put into practice. Fortunately, there are a bunch of tools available online to help you out. Let’s go through them and see which ones are the most useful.

KeyClusters

KeyClusters is one of the better options for keyword clustering, because they aren’t just clustering your keywords for you, they’re adding in some element of competitive research by integrating real-time SERPs data into your clustering. It does a lot of cross-referencing and lumping keywords together to avoid issues with keyword cannibalization and split SEO.

The tool is also designed to take keyword exports directly from Ahrefs, Semrush, and other tools and analyze them directly; no reformatting or tedious manual pasting is required. The output it gives you is a nicely-formatted spreadsheet with the primary keyword and a list of related keywords you can then target to reach that primary keyword.

The KeyClusters Website

Pricing uses a credit system where one credit is one keyword it analyzes. Rather than a monthly subscription, you can pay for credits in batches, with larger batches giving you volume discounts. The smallest package is 1,000 credits for $9, and the largest is 30,000 for $130, a little less than half the price per credit. Since you always know how many keywords you want to plug into the system, it’s a fairly easy pricing plan.

Keyword Insights

Keyword Insights is a focused keyword clustering tool that uses a ML/AI system to analyze the keywords you plug in and seek the user intent behind them. The goal is to create tiered content clusters where you’re not just sorting them by relevant topic, but also by purpose. Since user search intent is such a huge part of effective marketing and modern CRO, it’s a potentially very useful feature.

Keyword Insights

Pricing here is similar to KeyClusters: 1 credit for 1 keyword. You can pay as you go at a rate of $8 per thousand credits, or you can get a monthly plan that also includes AI content generation, additional SERP exploration, and more. Those plans start at $58 per month, so it’s not cheap, but it’s effective at what it does.

It’s also worth mentioning that, among all of the tools on this list, Keyword Insights has had perhaps the most changes since it came out. It’s actively being developed, adding more features, and getting more useful, so it might be good to get in early.

Keyword Cupid

Possibly the most popular of the keyword clustering tools, Keyword Cupid is also one of the older ones available. They claim to use a neural network to reverse-engineer how Google’s systems work, which may not be entirely accurate, but the tool’s output is good enough that it makes no difference. Like KeyClusters, it uses real-time Google data for sourcing. It also supports direct imported data from keyword research tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and others.

What makes Keyword Cupid stand out is the other features they’ve added over time. For example, in addition to clusters, they can silo keywords into topic arrangements, give you a tight pillar and support framework, and even have a visual mapping version for the people who prefer something other than a spreadsheet of exported data.

Keyword Cupid

Keyword Cupid doesn’t have a pay-as-you-go option, and while you can buy additional credits, you need an active subscription to do so. Pricing starts at $10 per month for the most bare-bones reports and simple clustering. Advanced features like geotargeting the research SERPs, device targeting, and AI content tools like writing and content brief creation start at their $50 per month plan.

ClusterAI

ClusterAI is a tool that stands on its own but is also part of the ContentDistribution suite of products, all of which are technically independent but interlinked if you want to use them together. The downside to this is that, while you can use ClusterAI on its own, you’re going to constantly run into upsells trying to get you to use their other tools as well. Pricing is hidden but seems to start at $40 for 1,000 keywords in a monthly subscription.

The ClusterAI Tool

The tool itself is good. I don’t have any complaints about it; it’s just the context surrounding it that feels intrusive. Either make a comprehensive platform or separate your tools; these half-baked measures are annoying. I do appreciate that they have case studies that demonstrate how useful their features are.

SEO Scout

SEO Scout has the distinction of, in terms of keyword grouping anyway, a free tool. You can access and use it right now by clicking the link above, pasting in a keyword list, and letting it cluster them for you. It will produce some basic keyword clusters, though these largely go based on the similarity of keywords and a little less on real-time SERP data.

SEO Scout Grouping and Clustering Tool

The downside, truthfully, is that it’s a very simple lead gen tool, so it doesn’t have any of the extra data or accessory features that the other keyword grouping and clustering tools do. Obviously, since they don’t need to pay for APIs for it or anything, the data isn’t going to be as great, but it’s still serviceable if you have a large document of unsorted keywords you want to filter and group up.

ZenBrief

ZenBrief is similar to SEO Scout; it’s a keyword clustering tool you can access for free as a way to get you to try out their other features.

ZenBrief Keyword Clustering Tool

Other than the ability to choose a minimum and maximum number of keywords from your list that can be in any specific cluster, there’s really not much difference between them and SEO Scout.

Keyword Clarity

Another free tool, this one is slightly unique in that it allows you to sign into and authorize it to access your Google Search Console. You can also import keywords directly from sources like the Google Ads Keyword Tool or KeywordTool.io.

Keyword Clarity

The other benefit of this tool is that it builds clusters in the form of visual mindmaps and spider diagrams. This isn’t helpful if you want a spreadsheet to work from, but if you’re a visual person and prefer relational maps, it’s great.

Comprehensive Platforms

The bulk of this post is aimed at individual tools you can use for content and keyword clustering. That said, if you want, there are numerous larger platforms that offer keyword clustering as one of the many features they offer. Here are some of the better options you might consider.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking is an agency-level analytics and SEO toolkit. It can do a little of everything, from keyword research to competitive analysis to backlink checking to project management.

The SE Ranking Website

Their keyword clustering tool is an add-on, so you’re paying at least $52/month for their basic platform and an additional 4 cents per 10 keywords in the clustering tool. So, it’s not cheap, but doing it all in one place can be handy.

SurferSEO

SurferSEO is a mid-tier SEO tool that doesn’t do everything many other platforms do but takes a unique (and AI-fueled) approach to a lot of what they do.

The SurferSEO Website

Their keyword research tool does clustering by default, which is something of a rarity right now, though I expect to see it more in the future as clustering becomes the new normal for blog structures. Most of their AI features are generative content, though, which is likely to let you down if you’re aiming for the top.

SerpStat

Another of the larger all-in-one platforms, SerpStat at least allows you to try out their keyword clustering tool for free. The tool can handle lists of up to 50,000 keywords at a time and allows you to customize how you want your clustering to be handled between weak/medium/strong relationships and soft/hard clusters.

SerpStat Keyword Clustering Tool

You can also use a bunch of customizations to account for things like local keywords, even down to the city level, and research across other search engines. It’s all very powerful, and I like SerpStat a lot, but it’s a hard sell if all you need is a keyword clustering tool.

Getting a Keyword List

One thing you might have noticed from browsing through these tools is that they do research and put your keywords into clusters, but they don’t generally develop your keyword list for you. You’re expected to be the one to paste in your keywords, which means you need to get them from somewhere else first.

So, where do you get that keyword list from?

A couple of the tools directly support Ahrefs and Semrush, and I agree that both of those are excellent tools for keyword research. Most high-end SEO platforms are going to have some level of keyword research tool as well, and while you might need to do some minor reformatting, the data they export will work in these clustering tools just fine.

Another option I recommend is Topicfinder.

Topicfinder Competitor Research

I built Topicfinder as, well, a topic finder, but it’s also great for distilling those topics down into their source keywords. Sure, it’s a bit more work than just getting a keyword list, but since the topics all come from known ranking pages, you already know the keywords are good.

What about you? Do you have recommendations for a keyword clustering tool I haven’t mentioned here? I know there are a lot of them out there, and that a lot of the bigger SEO platforms are starting to integrate the features. If you have a favorite that I didn’t mention, feel free to leave it in the comments section, and I’ll be sure to check it out!

Written by James Parsons

James is the founder and CEO of Topicfinder, a purpose-built topic research tool for bloggers and content marketers. He also runs a content marketing agency, Content Powered, and writes for Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, and other large publications. He's been a content marketer for over 15 years and helps companies from startups to Fortune 500's get more organic traffic and create valuable people-first content.

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