How to use the keyword clustering tool
- Paste your list with one keyword per line. If your research tool gave you monthly volumes, put each one after a comma or tab on the same line. The tool totals them per group and lists the largest groups first. It reads up to 2,000 lines.
- Sort the list before you paste it, most important terms at the top. Each group is built around the first keyword that has not yet been placed, so the order decides which term anchors each cluster.
- Choose how many words two keywords must share. Two suits most lists. One works for a short list of closely related ideas; three helps when a long list keeps producing groups that are too broad.
- Select Group keywords, then Copy as CSV to paste the result into a spreadsheet with columns for group, intent, keyword and volume.
Everything happens in your browser. The keywords you paste are not sent to me and nothing is saved, so refreshing the page clears the list.
How the grouping works
The tool compares words, not meanings. It lowercases each keyword, drops filler words such as “the”, “for”, “in” and “and”, and trims simple plurals so “accountants” and “accountant” count as one word. It then takes the first keyword in your list and pulls in every other keyword sharing at least the number of words you chose. When that pass is finished, the next unplaced keyword starts a new group, and so on down the list.
Each group is named after its three most frequent words and given a rough intent label. The tool counts two fixed sets of words across the whole group. If research words such as how, what, guide, cost or price outnumber hiring words such as services, agency, consultant, hire or near me, the group is marked informational. If any hiring words appear and are not outnumbered, it is marked commercial. A group with neither is marked mixed or unclear, which is your cue to look more closely.
From clusters to pages
A cluster is a candidate page, not a decision. The aim is one page per search intent. If two clusters would be answered by the same page, merge them. If one cluster mixes people who want to hire someone with people who want to do the job themselves, split it. Two pages chasing the same intent is how keyword cannibalisation starts: both compete, and often neither ranks well.
The quickest check I know is to search the main term of each cluster on Google from a UK location and look at what ranks. If two clusters return mostly the same pages, Google treats them as one topic and so should you. If one set of results is all service pages and the other is all how-to guides, they need separate pages. This kind of SERP analysis takes a few minutes per cluster and catches what word matching misses.
Once the clusters are settled, give each page one main term in a keyword map and list the rest of its cluster as secondary terms. Each row then becomes a brief, and my SEO content brief template has a place for every part of it. Several clusters on one theme often work as a topic cluster, with a main page and supporting pages that link to it.
What the tool cannot tell you
- Synonyms stay apart. “Solicitor” and “lawyer”, or “flat” and “apartment”, share no words, so they land in different groups even when one page should target both.
- Shared words do not guarantee shared intent. “Boiler repair cost” and “boiler repair near me” will usually group together, yet one is research and the other is someone ready to book. The whole group gets a single intent label, so read the keywords inside each group rather than trusting the label, and split where needed.
- Order changes the result. Each keyword is compared with the first keyword in its group, not with every member, so moving a term up or down the list can move it to another group.
- One-word terms are greedy. A keyword that is a single word once filler is removed pulls in every later keyword containing that word. Put such terms near the end of the list, or leave them out.
- It has no search data of its own. Volumes appear only if you paste them, and it says nothing about keyword difficulty or how well a page could rank.
When to hand it over
For a list of a few hundred terms on a small site, this tool plus some careful checking of the results is often enough to reach a sensible page plan. If the list runs into thousands, covers several services or locations, or your site already has pages competing with each other, it is worth having it done properly. My keyword research service sorts a UK list by what each searcher wants and assigns one primary term to every page, and content SEO and strategy decides what those pages should say and in what order to publish them. If you are building Google Ads campaigns from the same list, the keyword match type tool formats it for broad, phrase and exact match.