You're ranking for 200 keywords. Thirty of them drive 90% of your organic traffic. Three of them generate 80% of your organic-attributed MRR.
That's a typical distribution. Most SaaS founders don't know which three keywords those are.
Here's how to find them.
The gap between traffic keywords and revenue keywords
High-traffic keywords often have low commercial intent. "What is keyword cannibalization" gets searched a lot. But the people searching it are learning, not buying. They'll read your post, maybe bookmark it, and leave.
Revenue keywords are different. They tend to be:
- Tool-specific: "keyword cannibalization checker" instead of "what is keyword cannibalization"
- Comparison-oriented: "semrush alternative for revenue tracking" instead of "best seo tools"
- Problem-specific with implicit urgency: "why is my seo traffic not converting to demos"
The second type has lower search volume but higher commercial intent. A searcher looking for "keyword cannibalization checker" is ready to use a tool today. The traffic is smaller but the conversion rate is 5-10x higher.
Step 1: Pull your top 50 keywords by clicks from Search Console
Export Search Console data for the last 90 days. Filter to your top 50 keywords by total clicks. This is your starting universe.
You'll notice something immediately: the top 10 keywords by clicks are almost all informational. Blog post topics, educational queries, broad informational terms. High traffic, low buyer intent.
Keywords 20-50 start to look different. They're more specific. More tool-like. More comparison-flavored. These are often where your actual revenue comes from.
Step 2: Map each keyword to a conversion event
For each keyword in your top 50, you need to know: how many visitors who entered through this keyword eventually completed a trial signup?
This requires joining Search Console data (query → landing page) with your analytics data (landing page → session → signup event). If you're using PostHog, you can trace sessions from their referrer URL. If you're using GA4, you can segment by organic landing page and look at conversion events.
The challenge is the time lag. Someone might search a keyword, land on your site, and not sign up for 2 weeks. Standard session-based attribution misses them.
A better approach: track first-touch attribution at the user level. When someone creates an account, capture their original UTM parameters or referrer URL and store it. Even a simple firstTouchReferrer field in your users table tells you vastly more than session-level analytics.
Step 3: Extend attribution to revenue
Once you know which keywords drove trial signups, extend the chain: which of those signups converted to paid? And what's their MRR?
This is where most attribution tools stop. They'll tell you a keyword drove 50 signups. They won't tell you that 48 of those signups never upgraded, while 2 became your highest-value customers.
For SaaS, the metric you want is MRR per keyword. It's calculated as:
MRR per keyword = (Signups from keyword × Trial-to-paid conversion rate × Average plan price)
/ Total keywords in cluster
Or more simply: connect Stripe customer IDs to the UTM/referrer data you stored at signup, and sum MRR by keyword.
Step 4: Rank keywords by MRR efficiency, not traffic
Once you have MRR attributed per keyword, calculate revenue per click:
Revenue per click = MRR attributed / Monthly organic clicks
A keyword with 500 clicks and $2,000 MRR attributed ($4.00/click) is 10x more valuable than a keyword with 5,000 clicks and $500 MRR attributed ($0.10/click).
Most SEO strategies optimize for traffic. Optimizing for revenue per click is a different, more profitable strategy.
What you do with this information
Once you know your revenue keywords:
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Create dedicated feature pages for each revenue keyword cluster. Not blog posts, landing pages that speak directly to the buyer intent.
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Build internal links from your high-traffic informational posts to your revenue keyword pages.
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Expand your coverage of revenue keyword clusters. Find adjacent keywords with similar buyer intent and create content that links back to your core pages.
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Stop investing in high-traffic, low-revenue keyword clusters. Audit your existing content and redirect resources.
tracerHQ's keyword revenue attribution feature does this analysis automatically. Connect your Search Console, analytics, and Stripe data, and you'll see a ranked table of your keywords by revenue attributed, not just traffic.
The compounding effect
When you know which keywords drive revenue, you double down on them. You create more content in those clusters. You build more links to those pages. Rankings improve. More revenue per click compounds.
The alternative is spending equal effort on all keywords, most of which are traffic noise that never converts.
See which keywords drive your MRR → Connect to tracerHQ free.