The Scenario
You are a content strategist. The weekly content planning meeting is Monday at 10 AM. It is Friday afternoon. You have 200 target keywords in column A of the Keywords tab in an Excel workbook.
Before Monday you need search volume and keyword difficulty in columns B and C. Without them the meeting devolves into gut-feel debates and nothing gets assigned.
The bad version of Friday afternoon:
- You open Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and paste in your first batch
- You copy the volume and KD numbers, switch to Excel, paste them into the workbook
- You realize Ahrefs's batch input limit means you need to split 200 keywords into multiple rounds
- You paste batch 3 into the wrong rows and have to fix the alignment
- You are still in front of the workbook at 6:30 PM with 60 keywords left to enrich.
The fast version is one prompt before you pack up.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads your keyword list and calls Ahrefs for all 200 keywords at once, without you managing batch sizes or copying columns.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Look up the monthly search volume and keyword difficulty for every keyword in column A of the Keywords tab from Ahrefs. Write search volume to column B and keyword difficulty to column C. In column D, label keywords with KD above 70 as "Hard" and those below 30 as "Easy." Leave column D blank for anything in between.
SheetXAI reads all 200 keywords, calls Ahrefs, writes the metric columns, and adds the difficulty labels. The workbook is ready for Monday.
What You Get
An enriched keyword table with 200 rows in the Keywords tab:
- Column A — keyword
- Column B — monthly search volume
- Column C — keyword difficulty score
- Column D — difficulty label (Hard, Easy, or blank)
The labels compress the Monday decision. Hard keywords go on the long-term roadmap. Easy keywords get assigned this sprint. The team looks at the workbook for two minutes and has a plan.
Want SERP data too? Ask SheetXAI to also fetch the top 5 ranking URLs per keyword and write them to columns E through I.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Keyword lists assembled by a team over weeks are rarely clean. SheetXAI handles cleanup and enrichment in the same prompt.
When keywords have inconsistent capitalization or extra spaces
Some keywords are all lowercase, some are title case, some have double spaces.
Normalize all keywords in column A of the Keywords tab to lowercase with single spaces before running the Ahrefs lookup. Then fetch search volume and KD and write to columns B and C.
When the team wants keywords grouped by topic cluster
After enrichment, the content lead wants keywords sorted by topic, not alphabetically.
After writing search volume to column B and KD to column C, group the Keywords tab rows by topic cluster based on the keyword text. Create a new tab called "Clustered" with a section header per cluster and keywords sorted by search volume descending within each cluster.
When the list has duplicate keywords
The list was built by multiple team members and has repeated entries.
Before fetching Ahrefs data, deduplicate column A in the Keywords tab removing exact duplicates (case-insensitive). Then run the search volume and KD lookup for the clean list and write to columns B and C.
When the planning meeting also needs SERP competitor insight
The content director wants to know which domains dominate across the keyword list.
Fetch search volume and KD for all keywords in the Keywords tab column A and write to columns B and C. For each keyword, retrieve the top 5 ranking URLs and write them to columns D through H. In a new tab called "SERP Dominance," extract the root domain from each top-ranking URL and count how many times each domain appears across the full keyword list, sorted by frequency descending.
The pattern: enrichment runs in one call. Clustering, deduplication, and SERP analysis extend the same prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a keyword list, then ask it to pull search volume and KD from Ahrefs. The Ahrefs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to expand seed keywords into related terms in Excel or the Ahrefs in Excel overview.