How Do You Find and Group Keywords?

To find keywords, start by listing seed terms based on your products, services, and audience’s questions. Then expand the list with research tools and fill in gaps with keywords your competitors already rank for. When grouping keywords, the key is not whether the wording looks similar, but whether searchers want to accomplish the same thing and whether the search results are similar. Keywords with the same intent can usually be addressed on a single page, but you still need to check whether the content would be too thin or too broad. Not every keyword should automatically become a separate article.

Build a Candidate List Using Your Customers’ Language

Seed keywords are starting points for research, not necessarily the terms you will ultimately target. First, list broad topics related to your business, then expand the list by considering these questions:

• What core categories do your products or services cover?
• What problems does your audience want to solve? What wording would they actually use?
• What relevant topics are your competitors covering?

At Procrustes, our content services also start with the questions customers genuinely care about: we plan, write, and regularly update articles around those questions.

Next, enter different seed keywords into keyword research tools to collect related terms and more specific queries. Do not stop after researching just one term. You can also examine keywords your main competitors already rank for and add relevant terms you previously missed, rather than copying every keyword they target.

Assess Which Keywords Are Worth Targeting, Then Organize Them in a Spreadsheet

The keywords found by tools are only candidates. Consider search demand and ranking difficulty alongside whether your content can meet searchers’ needs and whether targeting those keywords would support your business goals. Even a keyword with high search volume and seemingly low difficulty may not be worth targeting if it does not align with what your website offers.

You can record keywords, search intent, search volume, and difficulty in a spreadsheet, with an additional column for each keyword’s group. This lets you consider both demand and purpose when grouping terms, rather than merging them solely because their wording is similar or choosing a content direction based only on search volume.

Use Search Intent and Results to Decide Whether Keywords Belong on the Same Page

Start by distinguishing between searches for information, a specific website, comparisons, and actions such as making a purchase. Even when keywords fall into the same intent category, they do not necessarily belong in the same group. Similar wording does not guarantee the same search goal, either. For example, “how to bathe a dog with apple cider vinegar” and “dog shampoo containing apple cider vinegar” use similar wording, but reflect different goals: the first seeks how-to guidance, while the second leans toward product research.

Review the search results for each query, then check your grouping with three questions:

• Do the ranking pages overlap? If the same pages rank well for these keywords, that is usually a sign that the keywords can be grouped together.
• Is the content scope reasonable? If separate pages would be too thin, consider combining them. If combining them would make the topic too broad, keep them separate.
• Would readers explore these topics together? If a typical user would want to learn about these topics together, they are more likely to belong on the same page.

Assign a Topic and a Primary Keyword to Each Group

After grouping, draft a working page title based on the topic, then select the primary keyword that best represents the group. Terms with higher search volume within the group are usually worth considering. Use secondary keywords with the same intent and related subtopics to develop the content, rather than repeating the primary keyword over and over.

For smaller lists or when precise control is needed, you can group keywords manually. For large keyword lists, automated clustering tools can help. Then review the groups using the search intent and content scope checks above, and save each group under a page name or label.