The keyword research most SaaS teams do for paid search produces a familiar list. The category head term. A handful of feature based terms. A small number of competitor brand terms. The list looks comprehensive on a slide and tends to overlap almost completely with what every competitor is already bidding on, which is why the auction for those terms is so expensive.
The keyword research that actually matters happens around the edges, in themes that are less obvious to a marketing team but very obvious to the people who do the job your software supports. This is how to find them.
Start from the user's job, not the product's name
The product team knows the product by its name and feature set. The buyer often searches for the job they are trying to get done, in the language of their day to day work. The gap between those two vocabularies is where uncrowded keyword themes live.
Sit with three or four customers for thirty minutes each and ask them what they searched for in the months before they bought. The answers are almost never the head terms. They are situational searches: how do I solve this specific problem, what tool do people in this role use, what is the difference between this approach and that approach.
Mine the support and sales conversations
Your support tickets and your sales call notes contain a vocabulary your keyword research has never seen. The phrases customers use when they are stuck, the names they call competing products, the workarounds they describe before they found yours. Each of these is a candidate keyword theme.
Run a monthly extraction. Have someone read the last thirty days of support tickets and sales call summaries and pull out every phrase that sounds like something a stranger might search. Add the surviving phrases to your keyword research backlog. The themes that emerge from this exercise are typically the cheapest sources of qualified clicks in the entire account.
Use the comparison shopper's vocabulary
Buyers in the comparison stage of the funnel use a predictable set of qualifiers. Best, alternative, versus, comparison, review. Each of these stems generates a meaningful family of long tail searches that competitors often neglect because the search volume on any single phrase looks small.
Aggregated, the long tail comparison searches in any SaaS category often outweigh the head term volume, with significantly lower competition and better intent. The keyword research that catches this opportunity treats the qualifier stems as a campaign template rather than as one off keywords.
Look for jargon that is rising
Every SaaS category has emerging jargon that comes from analyst reports, conference talks, or thought leadership pieces. The jargon enters general use slowly. Your buyers start searching for it before your competitors start bidding on it.
Subscribe to the analyst reports for your category. Watch the conference talks for the language being introduced. Add the new vocabulary to your keyword research as it emerges, not after a competitor has already bid up the auction.
Build a keyword research cadence, not a project
The most common keyword research mistake is treating it as an upfront project that gets done once when the account is built and then revisited only when results decline. The buyer's vocabulary moves continuously and the auction moves with it.
Establish a monthly keyword research cadence. Pull search query reports. Mine support and sales conversations. Add candidate themes to a backlog. Promote the strongest candidates to live campaigns each month. Retire themes that have decayed. The accounts we manage that follow this cadence have meaningfully cheaper net new keyword acquisition than the accounts we inherit that do not.
Want to talk about applying any of this to your account? Send us a note and a senior expert will reply within one business day.