Organising Large Keyword Lists
5 min read
Cleaning, deduplicating, grouping and exporting thousands of phrases into something a content plan can actually use.
Clean before you analyse
Exports from different sources arrive inconsistently: stray punctuation, double spaces, mixed capitalisation, tracking fragments and duplicates that differ only by case. Any analysis performed on a dirty list produces misleading groups and inflated counts.
Normalise first — trim whitespace, standardise case, strip punctuation you do not need — then deduplicate. Only then start counting or grouping.
Group into page-sized clusters
Grouping by shared head term is a fast, transparent approximation of intent clustering that runs instantly in the browser. It will not be perfect, but it collapses a thousand-row list into a few dozen reviewable clusters, which is the point.
Review each cluster and ask one question: would a single page satisfy everyone who typed any of these? If yes, it is a page. If no, split it.
Export in a format your workflow reads
Finish by converting the cleaned, grouped list into the format your team uses — comma-separated for ad platforms, one per line for briefs, CSV for spreadsheets. Doing the conversion at the end, once, avoids reformatting the same data five times.
Frequently asked questions
- Is case-insensitive deduplication safe?
- For keyword research, yes — search engines are not case-sensitive. Keep original casing only when the list contains brand names you plan to display.
- Can Hashly handle very large lists?
- Processing happens in your browser, so the practical limit is your device's memory. Lists of a few thousand lines are handled comfortably on typical hardware.