Keyword fanatics, I came up with this idea for keyword researching when I still worked for that startup called Flow-e.

I had to build the new structure for the blog, and I had to figure out which topics to choose for the silos.

After spending hours researching keywords in Ahrefs, I saw something I hadn’t noticed in Ahrefs before.

Their parent topics.

Parent topics in Ahrefs indicate the origin of a given keyword.

These are basically silos, or clusters, or clouds, whatever you call them.

And in fact, I took the risk (as I haven’t seen anyone before mentioning this approach), and I build Flow-e’s blog structure around these parent topics.

You shouldn’t doubt whether this approach worked.

I’ve written a case study of this approach, which resulted in substantial organic growth.

This tutorial will be short and sweet.

I will demonstrate how to find long-tail keywords and quickly sort them out in silos in under 3 minutes.

Tools used in this tutorial

What Are Long-Tail Keywords?

Long-tail keywords are longer (usually 4+ keywords) and more specific keyword phrases that visitors typically use when they’re closer to the purchase phase.

Two distinctive features characterize long-tail keywords

• Lower local and global search volume.
• They are less competitive and easier to rank due to their lower search volume. Usually, the most prominent websites with significant presence and authority on Google won’t bother chasing low-volume keywords. They will go after keywords with huge traffic potential.

When Should We Use Long-Tail Keywords?

All the time.

And mandatory when you are just starting out with your niche website or writing your first blog posts for your SaaS product.

I promise, you will thank me later.

Don’t forget that a SaaS product is basically a niche website.

Step-by-Step Tutorial on How to Find Long-Tail Keywords

Step 1: Open Ahrefs and plug-in your seed keyword

Step 2: Export and download your list of long-tail keywords

Before exporting 100 000 rows (they are expensive in Ahrefs!), ensure that you have filtered your keywords against specific criteria such as keyword difficulty, search volume, word count, etc.

Next, once you have downloaded the file with keywords, delete all the unnecessary columns.

Usually, I leave only these four columns: Keyword, Keyword Difficulty (KD), Volume, and of course, Parent Topic (mandatory for this tutorial).

Step 3: Open new base (sheet) in Airtable (it’s free) and paste your keywords

When you create a new base in Airtable, make the same number of columns to match your export file's columns.

And you may guess it right, give them the same names.

Let's do the pasting together. Watch me doing it.

After you paste the keywords in Airtable, there is only one action to take.

Locate the "Grouped by" field on the base menu, click on it, and chose to sort data by "Parent topic."

On the left, you can see the parent keyword, and under the Keyword column you will see all long-tail keywords relevant to the parent topic. 

Easy, right?

p.s at the beginning, there is some video quality problem, but after the "pasting part" everything goes back to normal. Also, you can open the video in YouTube, where the quality is okay. Sorry about that.

Here is How I Usually Build my Content Around This Approach

Approach #1

Suppose there are many long-tail keywords under a parent topic, and I can write at least 1000 words for each keyword.

In that case, I will make the parent topic my cornerstone article (or the money article).

The long-tail keywords will be my supplementary articles, which will link back to the cornerstone article (usually, this is where the money is at).

Approach #2

If the long-tail keywords answer short questions or have semantic meaning (very similar keywords), I will take their parent topic as the main keyword for the article.

Then I will cover all supplementary keywords from their relevant parent topic and create one extremely comprehensive article.