Save Time With Keywords Explorer Tool

Instant clustering works by grouping keywords using a proprietary metric in Ahrefs called Parent Topic. To get this metric, we take the #1 ranking page for your keyword and find the keyword responsible for sending the most traffic to that page.

The top-ranking page for “best drip coffee maker” is from Wirecutter:

The same page ranks #1 for “best thermal carafe coffee maker”…

… and for “best filter coffee maker”:

Because of this, all three keywords have the same Parent Topic (“best drip coffee maker”) and fall under the same cluster:

It’s clearly possible to rank higher for all keywords in the cluster with just one page because that’s exactly what the Wirecutter’s page does.

This method of clustering is faster than many other keyword clustering tools because, unlike them, we don’t have to do much computing on the fly to group keywords. We already have Parent Topics stored.

Just enter your broad search or list of keywords and click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab in the Overview or a keyword ideas report:

You’ll see your keywords grouped into clusters by Parent Topic and sorted by Cluster volume.

To see the keywords in a cluster and their metrics, hit the caret in the Keywords column:

Let’s go into more detail for a few different scenarios.

Paste in your list of up to 10,000 keywords, hit search, and click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab on the Overview report. That’s it!

Enter a few seed keywords, go to one of the keyword ideas reports (e.g., Matching terms), then hit the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab to cluster all keyword ideas.

If you want to be more selective, use the filters to refine your search and add keyword ideas you like to a keyword list.

If you then select this your list of keyword lists on the left and hit the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab, it’ll cluster your list:

Enter a competitor’s domain into Site Explorer, go to the Organic Keywords report, and export the data.

Term clustering is where you group keywords by the words or phrases they contain rather than intent. It’s useful for understanding trends, finding niches, and clustering keywords into topical buckets so you can create related content in batches.

To do it in Ahrefs, just hit the “Clusters by terms” tab in the Overview or a keyword ideas report.

For example, if you enter “notion” as your seed keyword and cluster by terms, you’ll see that one of the term clusters is “template”:

This cluster contains 5,098 keywords with a global combined search volume of 257K.

If you hit the caret to reveal the keywords, you’ll see all kinds of Notion templates people are searching for, like:

• notion budget template
• notion calendar template
• notion project management template
• notion school template
• notion journal template
• notion workout template
• notion travel template

Given how much search traffic potential there is here, this could be a great niche for a new website.

Keyword clustering speeds up content production by turning keywords into topics that writers can immediately start working on. It also helps you produce more comprehensive content, as keywords in clusters often represent important subtopics.

Ahrefs is the best keyword clustering tool if you’re looking to cluster keywords fast. It takes just seconds, while other tools can often take more than an hour just to cluster a few thousand keywords.

Keywords Explorer is arguably less accurate than some keyword clustering tools because it clusters by Parent Topic. This means we’re judging the similarity of keywords based on the top-ranking result, not the entire SERP (as some other tools do). But that’s also why it’s so fast!