The Scenario
You are a freelance SEO consultant. The client deliverable is due Friday. It is Wednesday. You have 15 seed keywords in column A of the Seeds tab in an Excel workbook, the core topics the client wants to rank for.
You need each seed expanded into 10 related terms with search volume — 150 rows of keyword data the client's content team can use directly for briefs.
The bad version of Wednesday:
- You open Ahrefs Keywords Explorer for seed 1, click Matching Terms, copy the top 10 by volume
- You paste them below the seed in the workbook, add a parent label column, move to seed 2
- Six seeds in you realize you have been pasting into the wrong rows for the last three seeds
- You spend an hour undoing and redoing
- The deliverable arrives Saturday morning with a note that says "sorry for the delay."
The fast version is one prompt and you spend Thursday reviewing.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads your seed keywords and fetches related terms with volume from Ahrefs for all 15 at once, without you working through them one at a time.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each seed keyword in column A of the Seeds tab, fetch 10 matching terms from Ahrefs with their monthly search volume. Add them as rows below each seed. Write the related term to column A, the parent seed keyword to column B, and search volume to column C.
SheetXAI reads all 15 seeds, calls Ahrefs for each, and builds the 150-row keyword table with every related term labeled back to its parent. The deliverable is done.
What You Get
An expanded keyword table with up to 150 rows in the Seeds tab:
- Column A — the related keyword term
- Column B — the parent seed keyword
- Column C — monthly search volume
- Organized — related terms grouped under each seed
The parent label makes this deliverable-ready. The content team filters by seed and sees all the related topics for that cluster. No additional labeling required.
Want keyword difficulty too? Add "and keyword difficulty in column D" to the prompt. Want to filter to terms with volume above 500? Add that condition.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Client seed lists are often rough drafts. SheetXAI handles cleanup and expansion in the same prompt.
When seed keywords have extra spaces or inconsistent casing
The list came from a Teams thread and some keywords have trailing spaces or mixed capitalization.
Clean up all seeds in column A of the Seeds tab — trim spaces, convert to lowercase — then fetch 10 matching terms per seed from Ahrefs with search volume. Write related term to column A, cleaned seed to column B, and volume to column C.
When the client wants deduplicated results across seeds
Two different seeds might return the same related term. The client wants no duplicates.
After fetching 10 related terms per seed from Ahrefs with search volume, remove any duplicate terms that appear under more than one seed, keeping the instance with the highest volume. Write the deduplicated list to a new tab called "Clean Keywords."
When the client also needs keyword difficulty
The content team wants to tackle easy wins first and needs KD alongside volume.
For each seed in column A of the Seeds tab, fetch 10 matching terms with monthly search volume and keyword difficulty from Ahrefs. Write related term to column A, seed to column B, volume to column C, and KD to column D. Sort by KD ascending within each seed group.
When the deliverable also needs a summary tab
The client wants a one-page summary showing which seeds have the most total search volume in their related terms.
Fetch 10 related terms per seed with search volume and KD and write the expanded table as above. Then in a new tab called "Summary," list each seed, the total combined search volume of its 10 related terms, and the average KD. Sort the Summary tab by total volume descending.
The pattern: the expansion runs in one call. The summary analysis and deduplication extend the same prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a seed keyword list, then ask it to expand the seeds using Ahrefs. The Ahrefs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to generate autocomplete keyword ideas in Excel or the Ahrefs in Excel overview.