Did you know that 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine? For SaaS companies, this single statistic is proof that it is important to show up where your audience is already looking. Whether you’re a founder, marketer, or SEO specialist, mastering keyword research is no more because of only driving traffic, you need it now to capture qualified leads, reduce customer acquisition costs, and fuel long-term revenue growth.
But keyword research for SaaS isn’t quite the same as it is for eCommerce stores or local service providers. SaaS users move through a unique digital journey that blends education, product research, and trust-building, often across multiple touchpoints and timeframes. That means your keyword strategy has to be more than a list of high-volume search terms. It needs to align with user intent, buyer journey stages, and your product’s specific use cases.
This guide is built to help you do exactly that.
In the following sections, we’ll break down what makes SaaS keyword research different, why it matters for sustainable growth, and how to do it right, from identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP) to building content clusters that drive compounding SEO results.
We’ll walk you through a proven, step-by-step research process and show you how leading SaaS brands like ClickUp, Ahrefs, and Asana leverage keyword data to scale both rankings and revenue.
Expect practical tips, tool recommendations, real-world examples, and visual breakdowns to help you take action, not just absorb theory.
Whether you’re launching your first content strategy or refining an existing one, this guide will help you build a keyword framework that supports every stage of your funnel and positions your SaaS product for long-term success.
What is SaaS Keyword Research?
SaaS keyword research is the practice of uncovering, analyzing, and organizing search terms your ideal customers use at different stages of their journey. These are searches that reveal what people are looking for, and why they’re looking for it. Keyword research for SaaS companies is a way to reverse-engineer demand, align content with buyer psychology, and build an organic acquisition engine that compounds over time.
What makes SaaS keyword research different from general keyword research lies in the nature of the product, the customer journey, and the buying decision. Unlike an eCommerce store selling a physical product, or a local service provider targeting “near me” searches, SaaS companies must contend with a longer and more layered funnel.
Each stage, awareness, consideration, decision, requires a different content approach and keyword type. This is because the user is often learning about the problem for the first time, exploring different types of solutions, comparing competitors, and assessing how well your product fits their workflow, team size, or tech stack.
To visualize this, here’s a diagram mapping the SaaS buyer journey stages to keyword intent types:
As the diagram shows, awareness-stage users search for problem-based queries like “how to reduce churn,” while decision-stage users are more likely to search for brand comparisons or specific solutions. Mapping your keywords to each stage ensures you’re creating content that meets the prospect exactly where they are in their decision-making process.
As a result, a one-size-fits-all keyword strategy doesn’t work for SaaS SEO. Instead, you need a research process that maps to multiple layers of user intent. You’re not just targeting people ready to buy, you’re also educating people who don’t yet know they need your product.
Take, for example, a SaaS company that offers workflow automation for HR teams. In such a situation, a traditional keyword strategy might suggest targeting “HR automation software.” But a SaaS-informed strategy will uncover earlier-stage, problem-aware keywords like “how to reduce manual onboarding tasks” or “HR automation use cases.” It might also include comparison-stage queries like “Zapier vs Workato for HR” and bottom-of-funnel terms like “best HR automation software for startups.”
This is where understanding user intent becomes vital. Intent is the underlying reason behind every search. Are they looking to learn, solve a problem, or compare vendors? Good SaaS keyword research categorizes queries based on this intent and aligns them to stages of the buyer’s journey:
- Awareness (Problem-Aware): Users don’t yet know what kind of solution they need. They’re focused on symptoms and questions. Keywords in this category tend to be longer-tail and educational in nature.
- Consideration (Solution-Aware): Users know the general solution type and are evaluating options. They’re searching for comparisons, features, and reviews.
- Decision (Product-Aware): Users are close to converting and searching with high intent. They may include your brand name or terms like “pricing,” “trial,” or “best software for [specific use case].”
Mapping keyword research to this journey is what separates a high-performing SaaS content strategy from random content creation. It allows you to structure your entire content strategy with purpose; creating blog posts, landing pages, case studies, feature pages, and comparison guides that each serve a clear role in moving users forward.
It also means every piece of content becomes a strategic asset.
When your keyword research is aligned with funnel stages and user intent, your site architecture, internal linking, and content planning become easier and more effective. You’re now building a system that reflects how your customers think, search, and buy.
Why Keyword Research is Critical for SaaS Growth
For SaaS companies, growth is about acquiring the right users, at scale, and in a cost-effective way. That’s where keyword research comes in. It forms the backbone of a long-term SEO and content strategy that not only drives traffic but also nurtures leads and lowers customer acquisition cost (CAC) over time.
The SaaS market is crowded just like any other large tech industry, and so organic search is one of the few channels where smaller or newer companies can compete head-to-head with industry giants. Paid search gets expensive fast, especially for competitive SaaS terms. Social channels are unpredictable. But SEO, fueled by smart keyword research, compounds. It lets you plant seeds that keep growing, bringing in leads and signups long after the content is published.
At its core, keyword research helps SaaS companies position themselves where potential customers are already looking. This positioning can impact multiple growth levers:
- Lead generation through educational content
- Product discovery through solution- and feature-level pages
- Brand trust through top-ranking comparison or review content
- Sales enablement via content tailored to decision-stage searches
More importantly, keyword research acts as a bridge between content, product marketing, and demand generation. When you understand what your ideal customers are searching for, across different roles, industries, and stages of the funnel,then you’re improving how you talk about your product, how you structure landing pages, and even how you guide sales conversations.
Here’s how a solid Saas keyword strategy supports different areas of SaaS growth:
Content Marketing That Converts
Keyword-driven content allows you to attract your audience with relevance, not just volume. Instead of guessing what to write, your strategy is guided by actual demand signals. You’re answering real questions, solving real problems, and offering real value, which builds authority and trust. Over time, this drives more organic signups, demo requests, and free trial conversions.
For example, a SaaS platform like ClickUp doesn’t just write about “project management software.” They target terms like “how to manage team workflows,” “Gantt chart alternatives,” or “Asana vs Trello vs ClickUp.” These keyword-informed pieces address different stages of the user journey, generating awareness and guiding readers to their product.
Cost-Effective and Scalable Acquisition
Unlike paid ads, SEO is an investment that builds over time. With the right keywords, a single high-performing blog post or landing page can bring in thousands of visits per month for years. That lowers your dependency on paid channels and helps reduce CAC, especially critical for early-stage startups managing tight budgets.
One case in point: Ahrefs famously grew their traffic and brand visibility by investing heavily in SEO content targeting keywords like “SEO audit,” “backlink analysis,” and “keyword research tools”, all directly tied to their product’s use cases. The result? Millions in recurring traffic, inbound leads, and a market-leading position, all driven organically.
Product Positioning and Competitive Differentiation
Another of the benefits of keyword research in SEO for SaaS is that it sharpens how you talk about your product. Through competitor analysis and search trend insights, you can uncover gaps in messaging, overlooked features, and unique angles your competitors haven’t addressed.
Say your SaaS tool offers time tracking and invoicing. Instead of targeting generic terms like “freelance tools,” keyword research might reveal that users are actively searching for the “best time tracking app with invoicing.” That subtle insight helps you frame your product more clearly and target users with precise intent.
Sustainable Growth Flywheel
Additionally, when keyword research is done right, it fuels a flywheel. The more helpful, keyword-driven content you produce, the more visibility you get. More visibility means more backlinks, more authority, and better rankings for other content. This feedback loop turns your blog, help center, and feature pages into a 24/7 acquisition channel.
And unlike ads that pause the moment you stop paying, organic growth keeps working. It’s SEO that scales with your business, especially valuable for SaaS teams aiming to grow sustainably without ballooning budgets.
Step-by-Step SaaS Keyword Research Process
If you’re wondering how to do keyword research for SaaS, you’re not alone. While the theory is easy to grasp, the execution gets tricky, especially in a space where buyer journeys are long, intent is nuanced, and your audience spans multiple personas.
Here is a practical breakdown of the SaaS keyword research process into eight clear steps, so you can go from a blank page to an organized, intent-driven SEO strategy that drives results.
Step 1: Identify Your ICP and Map Customer Journey Stages
Too often, keyword research starts with a tool. But in SaaS, it should start with the customer.
Your first task is to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This includes their demographics, job titles, goals, pain points, and where they hang out online. Ask yourself, “what problem are they trying to solve when they first land on Google?” “What language do they use to describe that problem?”
For instance, if your SaaS platform helps HR teams onboard remote employees, your audience might be People Ops managers at fast-growing startups. Their pain may not just be “onboarding software,” it could also be “How do I give a great onboarding experience without adding overhead?”
Once you’ve mapped out your personas, overlay that with the customer journey. Think in stages of awareness, consideration, and decision as you’re trying to reverse engineer thought processes and buying behavior. That foundation changes everything that follows.
Step 2: Use Tools (e.g Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, etc)
Armed with a clear sense of your audience, it’s time to move into research. This is where SaaS SEO tools become invaluable. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Google Keyword Planner let you plug in seed terms and uncover hundreds of related search queries and find patterns in the language your audience uses.
For example, plug “employee onboarding” into SEMrush and you might find adjacent phrases like “virtual onboarding best practices,” “remote onboarding checklist,” or even “how to onboard someone on Slack.” Each of these tells a story and opens the door to long-tail SaaS keywords that reflect real user needs.
Don’t just stop at those tools, though. Google’s autocomplete, People Also Ask, and Reddit forums can reveal questions that haven’t yet made it into the keyword databases but are highly relevant. These raw insights often lead to high-performing content ideas that your competitors overlook.
Step 3: Find Core Keywords by Product Category and Use Case
With your research underway, begin to cluster terms around your product’s core categories and use cases. These are typically high-intent phrases that describe what your software does or what it replaces.
Say you offer invoice automation software. Your core keywords might include:
- “automated invoicing for freelancers”
- “recurring billing software”
- “invoice software for small business”
These map directly to your product features and should become the backbone of your feature landing pages or product comparisons.
But don’t limit yourself to product descriptions. Think in use cases, too. For example, “how to reduce invoice errors” or “send invoices automatically from Gmail.” These signal intent and can be gateways to your product especially when framed through helpful, solution-focused content.
Step 4: Explore Long-Tail and Intent-Based Keywords
While short, broad terms have more volume, they’re often dominated by big players and lack clarity of intent. That’s why long-tail SaaS keywords are gold.
They may only get a few hundred searches a month, but their specificity means you can match them to precise solutions and convert more qualified traffic. Examples include:
- “best invoicing software for international clients”
- “Stripe vs QuickBooks for SaaS billing”
- “how to automate invoice reminders with Zapier”
These are the kinds of queries your blog posts, tutorials, and knowledge base should address as they present you as solution-aware not just problem-aware, and can form built-in demand.
Step 5: Analyze Competitor Keywords and Content Gaps
You don’t need to start from scratch. By plugging your competitors’ domains into tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush, you can see exactly which keywords are driving traffic to them and which ones they’re missing.
Look for:
- Keywords they rank for but haven’t fully optimized (e.g., weak content, low authority)
- Content gaps; topics your shared audience is searching for, but no one’s covering well
- High-volume pages you can outperform with stronger UX or fresher data
Sometimes the best opportunities are the keywords everyone’s neglecting.
Step 6: Organize Keywords by Funnel Stage and Content Type
Once you’ve collected your keywords, don’t dump them into a spreadsheet and call it a day. Structure them by intent and content format.
Here’s a simple framework to start your structuring with:
| Funnel Stage | Example Keyword | Content Type |
| Awareness (TOFU) | “how to onboard remote employees” | Blog post / Guide |
| Consideration (MOFU) | “best remote onboarding software” | Comparison page |
| Decision (BOFU) | “[Your Brand] vs [Competitor]” | Product/feature page |
This approach aligns content to the buyer journey. It also allows your SEO strategy to move beyond traffic generation and toward real conversion impact.
Step 7: Prioritize Based on Keyword Difficulty, Volume, and Business Value
Not all keywords are worth chasing, even if they have high search numbers. A well-executed SaaS keyword research process filters ideas by more than volume. Look at:
- Keyword difficulty: Can you realistically rank within 6–12 months?
- Relevance to your ICP: Does it reflect a real use case or problem?
- Monetization potential: Could it lead to a sign-up, trial, or demo?
Sometimes, a term with 90 searches/month and high buyer intent outperforms a 3,000-volume keyword that’s informational and vague.
Use tools to assign difficulty scores, but don’t ignore gut instinct and business logic. Your time and resources are finite, so you should spend them where it counts.
Step 8: Build Topic Clusters and Plan Your Content Strategy Around Them
At this stage, you’re ready to turn your keyword map into a content strategy. This is where topic clustering comes in.
Choose a pillar keyword, say, “project management for remote teams.” Build a long-form, evergreen guide around it. Then, support it with cluster content targeting narrower long-tail SaaS keywords, such as, “how to delegate tasks remotely,” “Trello vs Asana for distributed teams,” “daily standup templates for remote workers.”
Internally link all content back to the pillar and across related pieces. This signals topical authority to search engines and creates a better user experience. Over time, this layered content model builds momentum, helping you rank faster and for more terms.
Conclusion
For SaaS companies, keyword research is a strategic foundation that drives sustainable growth, strengthens content marketing, and lowers acquisition costs over time. When done intentionally, it becomes the roadmap for reaching the right people with the right message at the right moment.
In this guide, you’ve seen how a complete SaaS keyword research process begins with understanding your ideal customer profile and their journey. You’ve learned how to use powerful SaaS SEO tools to uncover core and long-tail keywords, how to analyze the competition, organize keywords by funnel stage, and turn insights into topic clusters that support long-term content planning.
These steps aren’t just for large teams or mature companies. Even early-stage SaaS startups can benefit by applying the same principles on a smaller scale. The key is to get started with clarity and consistency.
If your product solves a real problem, then your audience is already searching. What matters now is how easily they can find you.
Use what you’ve learned here to take the first step. Start mapping your keyword strategy. Begin building the content that brings your users closer. Growth begins with that first search.
