Who it's for
SEO for SaaS startups
Your category term belongs to a company with a content team and ten years of links, so you're not taking it this quarter and you should stop planning around it. What you can take is the long tail underneath it, most of which is already sitting in your Search Console account waiting for someone to sort it properly. Our engine scores it, and the AI writes the plan for taking it.
The category term isn't winnable yet, and that's fine
Every SaaS founder eventually types their category into Google, sees the same four incumbents and a listicle, and quietly decides SEO isn't for them. They're half right, because ranking for a broad commercial term against sites with years of accumulated links is a multi-year project with a real budget attached, and treating it as a near-term goal is how startups waste a year on content.
Where they're wrong is assuming the category term is where the customers are, when it's where the researchers are. The people who convert are usually searching something far more specific, because they have a particular problem, a particular stack, or a particular reason the obvious tool doesn't fit, and those searches have a fraction of the volume and a fraction of the competition while converting several times better.
You don't need to go hunting through a keyword database to find them, because once you've been indexed for a couple of months Google is already showing your pages for queries nobody at your company chose, and recording every one of them.
The queries worth your quarter
Four patterns come up again and again in early-stage SaaS exports. Our algorithm picks these out of your own data, and they usually move with an afternoon of editing.
- Alternative and comparison queries
- People searching for an alternative to an incumbent have already decided the incumbent is wrong for them. The competition for these is other small tools, not the category leader.
- The category term with a qualifier on it
- Not the head term, but the head term for a specific audience, stack, or company size. The intent is sharper and the field is thinner.
- The job, described the way a user would
- Users search for the problem long before they know your category exists. These queries rarely appear in a keyword tool because they don't look like commercial terms, but they show up in your own data.
- Integration and stack queries
- If you connect to something popular, people search for that pairing, and you'll usually find you're already picking up impressions on it without a page that mentions it.
The report scores and orders them for you, so what you work on first is arithmetic on your own numbers rather than a guess about volume. Pro shows each keyword’s monthly searches in its own column beside the score, so you can see the demand behind a term without it deciding your order for you.
Why founders stall on this
The analysis is rarely what stops people, it's that SEO is the thing you do on a Friday afternoon between shipping a feature and answering support, and every tool built for it assumes you arrived with a plan. You open a dashboard, get eleven thousand rows and six scores, and close it again, because deciding what to do with that is a bigger job than the job itself.
The bottleneck for a startup is prioritization rather than information, so the output here is an ordered list: step one, then step two, each naming what to change on which page, why it pays off for your specific data, and the example copy to use where copy applies. You can do the first step and stop, and the first step is still the highest-value one.
There's also a copy-for-LLM button on the full report that assembles the whole plan into a prompt you paste into ChatGPT or Claude, which is how most of the founders using this actually execute it.
What this isn't built for
If you need any of these you should buy a suite, and we'd rather you found that out now.
- Backlink research and monitoring. There's no link index here and there isn't going to be one.
- Rank tracking over time across countries and devices.
- Competitor analysis. We only ever look at your own data, never a rival site.
- Keyword research for pages and sites that don't exist yet. We start from the queries you already appear for, so there has to be something there to start from.
- Technical crawling and site audits.
If that list is what you came for, start with the Ahrefs comparison, which lays out where the trade actually lands.
Where it fits in the month
Run a report, do the first step or two, then leave it alone. Search doesn't respond fast enough for a weekly cadence to tell you anything, and re-running an analysis on data that has barely moved just gives you the same list back with different wording.
On Pro you can mark a report as shipped, and the analysis chart then plots your clicks and impressions around that date with a 28-day before and after comparison. It's context rather than proof, since seasonality, algorithm updates and everything else you shipped move those lines too, but it does tell you whether the work is worth continuing.
Common questions
We just launched and have almost no Search Console data. Should we wait?
Probably, yes. This works by reading the queries you already appear for, so if Search Console has been collecting for two weeks on a site with four pages there isn't much to read. Give it a couple of months of being live and indexed, then run a report. In the meantime the useful work is shipping pages that describe what the product does in the words a user would use, which doesn't need a tool.
Should we be blogging?
Eventually, maybe. But a startup with a handful of product and landing pages almost always has unclaimed opportunity on the pages it already has, and fixing those is faster and lower risk than committing to a publishing schedule you'll abandon in six weeks. The report is deliberately biased toward changing existing pages, and it'll tell you when a query genuinely warrants a page of its own rather than assuming every keyword needs one.
How is this different from Ahrefs or Semrush?
Those are research platforms: they carry their own crawlers and keyword databases so you can investigate markets, competitors and links from scratch. This does one narrower job, using only the data Google already has on you, and hands back an ordered plan rather than a dashboard. If you have a link building program or you manage several sites, buy a suite. We've written the full comparison for Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz separately.
Does it handle keyword cannibalization?
Yes, but only on a Pro report pulled from a connected Search Console account, because finding it requires knowing which of your pages ranked for which query and no export file contains those pairs. An uploaded report can't detect it on any tier. A narrower check does run on every report with page addresses in it: the same page being served under several URLs, which splits its own traffic.
Not quite a startup? The same argument, written for small businesses and for side projects.
Find the terms you can win this quarter.
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