One key message stood out at the recent Search Central event in NYC: traffic patterns are shifting, even for websites that have historically performed well.
Past SEO success doesn’t guarantee future results, but it does build something just as valuable: brand familiarity.
Showing up consistently in search drives clicks and brings you recognition.
When no one can predict what’ll happen to your traffic tomorrow, brand familiarity might be your most reliable lever for growth.
With search behavior in flux and brand familiarity proving to be a powerful and sometimes underestimated lever, I wanted to understand how 21 leading SaaS companies (each with over 1 million monthly organic visits) balance two forces: branded traffic dependency and intent-based keyword strategy.
That’s what the SEO Intent & Brand Dependency Report is about.
📈 Trends at a glance
Branded keywords comprise just 28.31% of the organic keyword pool but generate 59.04% of total traffic.
This shows how brand familiarity boosts visibility.
Users actively search for known product names, creating high-leverage opportunities for brand-led growth. Businesses with strong brand equity can easily compensate for broader keyword targeting gaps.
Each branded keyword drives an average of 18.32 visits, compared to just 2.96 visits for each non-branded keyword, meaning branded keywords generate over six times more traffic per keyword.
Branded keywords drive significantly more traffic, reflecting strong user intent to engage directly with the brand.
However, overdependence could limit discoverability for new users unfamiliar with the brand. That’s why businesses should also prioritize scalable, non-branded visibility.
Informational queries comprise over half of all keywords (55.75%), yet they drive nearly 78% of organic traffic.
Most SaaS websites' top-of-funnel content does the heavy lifting.
This overperformance is likely because AI overviews appear where they have the most utility for users: summarizing information on informational questions. Research by Mark Traphagen shows that AIOs appear in purely transactional queries only 1.2% of the time.
Despite accounting for just 8.51% of total keywords, navigational queries deliver an outsized 45.68% of total organic traffic.
Users are actively searching for company names, products, or branded services, and clicking through. This can be both a strength and a risk.
Strong brand presence converts well, but if navigational traffic makes up nearly half of your total traffic, you may be over-relying on brand recall rather than discoverability.
Navigational SEO can’t be your only growth lever, especially in competitive or category-level queries.
Commercial-intent keywords, like comparisons and category terms, make up around 23% of total organic keywords and generate just under 22% of organic traffic.
This near 1:1 ratio shows that commercial SEO keywords are relatively well-aligned but not overperforming. These pages could likely outperform their current return and drive more qualified leads if optimized for buying intent and conversion flow.
Transactional keywords, typically bottom-of-funnel, purchase-ready queries, account for 12.67% of keywords but only 10.40% of total organic traffic.
This under-delivery is typical in SaaS, where transactional queries tend to have lower search volume but higher value.
Landing pages, pricing comparisons, and product-led intent pages might not drive huge traffic, but they influence conversions. Right now, they’re under-used.
📌 Other quick takeaways
Navigational keyword percentage has the strongest correlation to traffic percentage.
The more navigational keywords a site ranks for, the more traffic it reliably earns, reinforcing how brand and product-specific searches are scalable across large SaaS platforms.
Commercial keyword correlation is weaker.
This suggests that commercial terms like “alternatives” or “best [tool]” are less predictable in how they convert to traffic. Optimization or SERP feature targeting may require more effort to perform consistently.
Transactional keywords have almost no correlation to traffic.
This indicates that ranking for BOFU terms doesn’t consistently translate to traffic, likely due to low volume, high competition, or under-optimized pages. There’s an opportunity here, but organic performance is far from guaranteed.
On average, navigational keywords are the most traffic-efficient.
Across the dataset, navigational keywords drive more traffic per keyword than any other type, often due to strong brand intent. However, the trade-off is that they don’t scale for user acquisition like informational queries.
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👋 Hey, it’s Sudipto. I’m a B2B SaaS content strategist and writer. If you enjoyed reading this, I’d love for you to share it with your network or pass it along to someone who’d find it useful! Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and share your thoughts.
