Stop fighting for keywords you can’t win
Most keywords are tiny, specific searches, and that’s exactly where a small site can actually rank.
New site, zero backlinks, and you’re targeting “project management software.” Respectfully: no. That spot on page one belongs to companies with ten-year head starts and SEO teams bigger than your whole company.
The good news is that search is mostly tail. In Ahrefs’ U.S. database, keywords with fewer than 10 searches a month make up almost 93% of all keywords. Ahrefs defines long-tail by search volume, not word count, and says these keywords are generally a lot less competitive. One catch: some long-tail keywords are just less popular phrasings of a big query, and Google ranks the same pages for all of them, so they’re no easier to win. Look for long-tail searches that are their own topic, where the specific wording changes what the searcher actually needs.
For a SaaS, these usually look like a problem plus a context: a specific tool, role or edge case. A dozen pages that each answer one of those properly is a far more realistic bet than one more doomed attempt at the head term.
The example
- Instead of
- “Target keyword: “project management software””
- Try
- “Target keyword: “how to track client approvals in Notion” (you sell an approvals add-on)”
Before you flush
Google your product’s core problem, collect 10 autocomplete and “People also ask” phrasings, and pick one specific enough to deserve its own page.