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 a Google Sheet, the core topics the client wants to rank for.
You need each seed keyword expanded into 10 related terms with search volume. That is 150 rows of keyword data the client can use to brief their content team. You promised a clean, usable spreadsheet.
The bad version of Wednesday:
- You open Ahrefs Keywords Explorer for seed keyword 1
- You click Matching Terms, filter to related terms, copy the top 10 by volume
- You paste them below the seed keyword in the sheet, add the seed as a label, move to keyword 2
- Six seeds in, you realize you have been copying the wrong column for search volume on three of them
- You go back and fix them
- The client gets the deliverable Saturday morning with an apology note.
The fast version is one prompt and you spend Thursday reviewing the output.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads your seed keywords and fetches related terms with volume data from Ahrefs for all 15 at once, so you do not have to work through them one at a time.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each seed keyword in column A, fetch 10 matching terms from Ahrefs with their monthly search volume. Add them as rows below each seed, with the seed keyword labeled in column B so each related term is tagged to its parent. Include the related term in column A and search volume in column C.
SheetXAI reads all 15 seeds, calls Ahrefs for each one, and builds a 150-row keyword table with each related term labeled back to its seed. The deliverable is done.
What You Get
An expanded keyword table with up to 150 rows:
- 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 is what makes this deliverable-ready. The client's content team can filter by seed keyword and see all the related topics for that cluster. No additional sorting or labeling required.
Want keyword difficulty too? Add "and keyword difficulty in column D" to the prompt. Want to filter to only terms with volume above 500? Add that condition and SheetXAI applies it.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Client seed keyword lists are often rough drafts. SheetXAI handles cleanup and expansion in the same prompt.
When seed keywords have trailing spaces or are inconsistently formatted
The list came from a Slack thread and some keywords have extra spaces or mixed casing.
Clean up all seed keywords in column A — trim spaces, convert to lowercase — then fetch 10 matching terms per seed from Ahrefs with search volume. Write related terms to column A, the cleaned seed to column B, and volume to column C.
When the client wants results deduplicated across seeds
Two different seeds might return the same related term. The client does not want duplicates in the final list.
After fetching 10 related terms per seed keyword in column A from Ahrefs with search volume, remove any duplicate terms that appear under more than one seed, keeping the instance with the highest search volume. Write the deduplicated list to a new sheet called "Clean Keywords."
When the client also wants keyword difficulty to prioritize
The content team wants to tackle easy wins first. They need KD alongside volume.
For each seed in column A, fetch 10 matching terms from Ahrefs with monthly search volume and keyword difficulty. Write related term to column A, seed to column B, volume to column C, and KD to column D. Sort the full list by KD ascending within each seed group so the easiest opportunities appear first.
When the deliverable needs a summary sheet for the client
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 in column A with search volume and KD and write the expanded table as above. Then in a new sheet called "Summary," list each seed keyword, the total search volume of its 10 related terms combined, and the average KD. Sort the Summary sheet by total volume descending.
The pattern: the expansion runs in one call. The summary analysis extends the same prompt without a second session.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with a seed keyword list, then ask it to expand the seeds with Ahrefs related terms and volume data. The Ahrefs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to generate autocomplete keyword ideas from topic seeds or the Ahrefs in Google Sheets overview.