“What is CRM” gets ~40,000 monthly searches in the United States and produces almost no pipeline for any CRM company on the planet. We have watched B2B SaaS marketing teams spend $80,000 of agency money chasing keywords like that and end up with traffic graphs going up and pipeline graphs sitting flat. The keywords that actually move pipeline are different. Lower volume. Higher intent. Often unsexy.
Below is the process we run for every B2B SaaS engagement — the workflow that took Workwize from 1,852 monthly organic visitors and $360K monthly pipeline to 13,420 visitors and a pipeline floor consistently above $1M per month.
Workwize · 22-month engagement · Jun 2024 → Apr 2026.
01 / Why most B2B SaaS keyword research fails
Open the tool, sort by volume, write 30 posts. Six months later, the pipeline graph is flat.
This pattern fails for four predictable reasons. We have inherited that exact engagement at least a dozen times — the fix is not more SEO, it is a different approach to keyword selection.
01
The volume trap.
A B2B SaaS purchase involves three to seven people, takes three to nine months, and lands a contract worth $5K to several hundred thousand annually. The buyer is sophisticated. They already know what CRM is. Anyone searching “what is CRM” is a student, a marketing intern, or two years away from buying. Targeting volume optimizes for the wrong audience on a fundamental level.
02
Tool difficulty as the only filter.
Keyword difficulty is useful as a sanity check and useless as a primary filter. A KD 8 with zero buyer intent is worse than a KD 35 with very high buyer intent. We routinely greenlight “hard” keywords because the SERP is genuinely beatable, and we reject “easy” keywords because nobody who searches them is going to buy software.
03
Working without buyer language.
Most agencies start in Ahrefs. We start in sales call transcripts. The phrases your buyers use almost never match your marketing copy and almost never match what your competitors are targeting. Working without buyer language is guessing. Working with it is being told.
04
Confusing pillars with mid-funnel content.
Generic agencies write pillars about “what is” topics. Your pillar pages should target the queries your buyer runs when they are six weeks from signing a contract — not six months from caring about the category.
02 / Start with buyer language, not Ahrefs
The biggest leverage point happens before any tool is opened.
The output of this phase is a document with 80 to 200 specific phrases your buyers actually use. Those become your seed keywords. Now you can open Ahrefs. Sources, in priority order:
Sales call transcripts
Gong, Fireflies, Chorus, raw Zoom. Read the last 30–50 calls. The discovery and demo portions are where prospects describe their problem in their own words. Those exact phrases become keywords.
Support tickets
Zendesk, Intercom, HubSpot Service. Filter to the first 30 days of a customer relationship. New-customer questions are nearly identical to pre-buyer questions.
G2 / Capterra / TrustRadius reviews
Of competitors. Read the negative reviews specifically. Complaints reveal pain points and the language buyers use to describe them.
Reddit threads in vertical subs
r/SaaS, r/B2BMarketing, r/Salesforce. Filter for high-engagement threads in the past 12 months. Comment threads are gold for buyer-language extraction.
LinkedIn comment threads
Posts from CMOs, VPs of Marketing, Heads of Growth in your category. The comments are a real-time view of what your buyer is thinking about.
Customer interviews
Eight to twelve calls with current customers. Ask: “Walk me through what you searched for.” Highest-resolution input in keyword research, almost no one does it.
03 / The four query types that move pipeline
We don’t chase volume. We chase intent.
Understanding these four categories is what separates B2B SaaS keyword research from generic keyword research. Each converts differently and is mined differently.
BOFU
Comparison queries
Salesforce vs HubSpot for outbound teamsPipedrive alternativesbest CRM for series B SaaS
Lower volume than head terms, dramatically higher intent. The conversion rate on comparison content is typically 3–6× the conversion rate on informational content.
How to find themEvery product your competitors lose deals to is a “[your product] vs [competitor]” query. G2’s “Top alternatives” sections on competitor pages are a free comparison-keyword goldmine.
Switch
Migration & switching queries
how to migrate from Asana to Linearmove off Salesforceimport Notion data into Confluence
Convert at 4–8× the rate of informational content. The searcher has decided they are leaving their current tool. They are not deciding whether to buy — only whether to buy yours.
How to find themEvery existing customer who switched ran a migration query. Survey them. Pull GSC for migration content. Look at competitor product comparisons that include migration paths.
Stack
Integration & stack queries
Slack and HubSpot integrationPipedrive Zapier triggersAPI rate limits for [tool]
End-users who land on a useful integration article become internal advocates inside the buying committee. Steady stream of pre-converted advocates and topical authority for low effort.
How to find themZapier / Make / n8n directories, API rate-limit complaints in support tickets, competitor integration directories, Reddit threads about connecting tools.
Native
Problem-aware (mined from sales calls)
“three weeks coordinating laptop returns from offboarded contractors”“shipping laptops internationally for new hires”the exact phrases your buyers actually use
Highest-value, lowest-competition keywords in the entire B2B SaaS landscape. The Workwize blog post built around the laptop-returns phrase ranked in 6 weeks and generated qualified inbound leads from people who had never heard of the brand.
How to find themRead or transcribe sales calls. Look for sentences that begin with “we’re trying to”, “the problem we have is”, or “we keep running into”. Those sentences are search queries.
04 / The scoring framework
Three axes, scored 1 to 5. Twelve or higher gets greenlit.
After mining 200 to 400 candidate keywords, you have to prioritize. 9 to 11 is borderline — cluster fit decides. Below 9 is a no, regardless of how the other axes look. Do not let one axis override the others.
01
Buyer intent
1 for generic informational, 5 for active vendor evaluation. “What is CRM” is a 1. “Salesforce vs HubSpot for outbound” is a 5. Anything below 3 needs an exceptionally strong reason to make the list.
02
Difficulty vs your DR
Not the raw Ahrefs difficulty. Whether we can realistically rank top 10 within 9 months given current authority. KD 35 might be a 4 for a DR 70 site and a 1 for a DR 12 site. Score honestly.
03
Pipeline relevance
Will ranking put you in front of a person who can buy your product? High volume + high intent + wrong company size = 1. Same query filtered by company size = 5.
05 / SERP analysis before you commit
Every SERP tells you four things. You have to extract them all.
Before any keyword reaches the publishing calendar, we open the SERP. The cost of writing on a topic where you have nothing new to say is one wasted month of your content engine. The cost of skipping it and finding a better topic is zero.
01
Format of the top 10
Listicles, long-form guides, tool comparison pages, Reddit threads, video carousel? If the SERP is dominated by Reddit threads, the searcher wants a real practitioner answer — not a polished marketing piece. Match the format.
02
Word count of the top results
Long-tail informational keywords often have 1,500–2,500 word top results. Comparison and pillar queries often have 3,500–5,000. Do not write a 1,000-word piece for a 4,000-word SERP. The bar is set by what is already there.
03
SERP features present
AI Overview, People Also Ask, video carousel, featured snippet. Each represents traffic and conversion the top organic positions don’t capture by themselves. Every keyword with an AI Overview present needs content built for AI extraction.
04
The information gain test
Read the top five results. Note what they all cover. Note what none of them cover. The “what none of them cover” list is your differentiation. If you cannot find at least one piece of unique value, do not publish.
06 / Mapping keywords to clusters, not isolated targets
A keyword is rarely a target by itself. It is a node in a cluster.
Modern Google ranks topical authority more than individual page authority. The structural implication: build clusters of 6 to 15 related pages around a central pillar, with bidirectional internal linking. This is not a clever tactic — it is the architecture Google has trained itself to reward over the past five years.
Our keyword research output is not a list of 200 keywords. It is a clustered map of 80 to 120 prioritized keywords organized into 6 to 12 topical clusters, each anchored by a pillar page. Every cluster page links up to its pillar with a descriptive anchor. Every pillar lists its cluster pages. Every cluster page links sideways to two or three siblings.
For Workwize, the clusters were structured around buyer scenarios: laptop deployment for remote teams, IT asset retrieval at offboarding, multi-country equipment logistics, hardware-as-a-service procurement workflows. Each cluster had a pillar page targeting the head term and 5 to 8 cluster posts targeting specific problem and migration queries. See the full B2B SaaS SEO playbook for the architecture →
07 / What this looked like for Workwize
DR 27 → 71. Pipeline floor above $1M/mo.
When we started in June 2024, Workwize had a Domain Rating of 27, 130 referring domains, and 1,852 monthly organic visitors. The previous agency was chasing volume keywords (“IT asset management software,” “best ITAM platform”) with 1,200-word posts. None of those pages ranked. None produced pipeline.
“Migrating from Excel for IT asset tracking,” “consolidating equipment management vendors,” “switching from internal IT for hardware deployment.” Each was a low-volume, high-intent query the buyer ran when they had decided to consolidate tooling.
Multi-country logistics queries
Mined from sales calls: “shipping laptops internationally for new hires,” “collecting equipment from offboarded contractors in multiple countries,” “EU and US compliance for cross-border IT shipping.” Most had under 100 monthly searches in Ahrefs. All converted at 6 to 9 percent of organic visits.
Vertical-specific queries
B2B SaaS, scaling startups, distributed agencies. Each vertical got its own cluster of content tied to specific compliance, scaling, and budget questions.
AI Search adaptation
Starting in 2025, we tracked how Workwize was being described in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Where the brand was getting cited but not recommended, we addressed entity clarity issues in third-party listicles. By early 2026, AI Referrals were generating 30 to 35 MQLs per month from a channel that did not exist 18 months earlier.
08 / Tools we actually use
Tools matter less than the workflow. Use what you know.
Below is the stack we use across most engagements, and what each tool is for. We do not use anything that promises automated keyword research or “AI-powered keyword opportunity discovery.” The output is the same generic list everyone else has.
Ahrefs
Primary tool. Strongest for backlink analysis, keyword volume validation, SERP overview. Site Explorer’s organic competitors view is genuinely useful for finding sites in your space worth studying.
Semrush
Secondary cross-check. The keyword gap tool is better than Ahrefs’s equivalent. Useful when Ahrefs gives a counterintuitive volume estimate for a difficult keyword.
Google Search Console
The most underrated tool in B2B SaaS keyword research. After a few months of data, GSC tells you exactly which queries you’re showing up for, where you have impressions but no clicks, and which queries sit in the “almost there” zone of positions 8–20.
Reddit & Quora native search
Free, irreplaceable. Searching your category there reveals real buyer questions and the language they use to ask them.
Sales call recording tools
Gong, Fireflies, Chorus. Whatever your team uses. Transcripts are the highest-leverage input in the entire workflow.
Manual AI Search prompt audit
Weekly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. A workflow rather than a tool, but it captures data nothing else does.
09 / Common mistakes
Seen in nearly every B2B SaaS site we have audited.
01Targeting parent topics that diverge from the buyer
Ahrefs will tell you the parent topic of “B2B SaaS marketing automation” is “marketing automation.” Those are not the same audience. The B2B SaaS qualifier is critical.
02Treating keyword difficulty as the only filter
A high difficulty score on a high-intent keyword is often beatable in B2B SaaS because most top-10 results are not actually built for B2B SaaS buyers. Generic content gets displaced by SaaS-specific content even at KD 40+.
03Ignoring AI Overview presence in the SERP
If AI Overview is present, you’re competing for the citation slot in addition to the top 10 organic positions. Content not formatted for AI extraction does not capture that surface, even at #1.
04Targeting keywords without product alignment
A B2B SaaS site can rank for “best CRM,” but if your product is project management software, none of that traffic converts. Pipeline relevance is non-negotiable.
05Documenting nothing
A keyword strategy that exists only in someone’s head does not survive the next agency change, the next CMO change, or the next quarter. The spreadsheet is not optional.
06Skipping the SERP analysis step
Picking keywords without checking the SERP is like writing a pitch without reading the brief. The SERP is the brief.
07Assuming volume translates to pipeline
It does not. Buyer intent is the variable that matters. Volume is a tiebreaker between two equally-intent-relevant keywords.
10 / FAQ
What teams ask before they hand over keyword research.
Part 02 of the B2B SaaS SEO playbook
This is the keyword research chapter.
The full playbook covers strategy, content, technical, links, AI search, and reporting.
