Define the customer and the job

A SaaS keyword list becomes more useful when it starts with a specific customer task. ‘Productivity’ is too broad to tell a writer what your software can explain. ‘Help a small design agency collect final approval from a client’ points toward workflows, templates, feature questions, and buying considerations that the product team can substantiate.

Collect language from support conversations, sales questions, onboarding friction, documentation searches, and public discussions you can read in context. Remove personal customer details from the research notes. Keep the wording of the underlying problem and the reason it matters, because that context can be lost when a question is reduced to a keyword.

Expand ideas across the customer’s decisions

Look for the process someone is learning, the software category they are evaluating, the limitations they need to check, and the migration or setup work that follows a purchase. Include terms that describe the problem without naming your product. Separate navigational brand queries from people discovering the category for the first time.

For a fictional approval tool, ‘client approval checklist’ could lead to a reusable resource, while ‘approval software for agencies’ could lead to a use-case page. ‘Approval software permissions’ might belong in documentation. These are illustrative page ideas; their search volumes must be checked before they are described as measured demand.

Record estimates with their market and source

Use the same provider, country, search engine, and observation date when comparing keyword estimates. Preserve a displayed range as a range. A monthly-search estimate describes modeled demand for a query; it does not predict the traffic your new page will receive. A tool’s difficulty label is another input to investigate, rather than a ranking promise.

Our October 24, 2026 research used Ahrefs’ free generator with Google and the United States selected. It returned ranges for relevant head terms and related questions. That makes the record useful for comparison without pretending the free tool provided exact counts. If a term returns no usable result, mark it unavailable instead of converting that absence into zero searches.

Inspect the results and group the intent

Read the kinds of pages returned for a candidate query. A calculator, product category, tutorial, and pricing page serve different needs. Ask whether you can provide the format and evidence the searcher appears to want. A large query for a checker is a poor article target if your page cannot perform the check.

Group phrases that could be answered by the same complete page. ‘Referring domains vs backlinks’ and ‘backlinks vs referring domains’ express the same comparison. A definition of backlinks and a detailed outreach workflow deserve different treatment because the reader is doing something different. Keep a note of that distinction so later writers do not recreate the same guide under another title.

Prioritize with a small editorial decision table

Choose a few questions your team can answer well. These criteria are an editorial framework, not a mathematical ranking formula or a tool-generated difficulty score.

  • Business fit: would the reader plausibly benefit from this product or resource?
  • Distinct purpose: does a current page already answer the same question?
  • Evidence: can the team provide a working example, accurate facts, or useful original material?
  • Demand and competition: what does the consistent keyword source show, and what do existing results offer?
  • Maintenance: who can keep the page correct when features or external facts change?

Hand the writer a page plan and review the evidence later

For each selected page, record its audience, main question, primary phrase, supporting questions, proposed format, evidence needed, and next useful action. Add the existing pages it should reference. This gives the writer a brief with a clear scope instead of an instruction to include twenty keywords repeatedly.

After publication, use Search Console to observe the queries and pages that actually receive impressions and clicks. Review whether the traffic is relevant and whether the content answers the questions people bring. Update the plan from that evidence before commissioning another group of pages with nearly identical promises.