What are bottom-of-funnel keywords?

Bottom-of-funnel keywords are the search terms a buyer uses when they are close to a purchase decision, not still learning the category. “Project management software,” “Asana vs Monday.com,” “Mailchimp alternatives,” “expense management software pricing,” these are the queries someone types when they are comparing options and getting ready to buy. The bottom of the funnel is the narrow end: fewer people, but the ones left are the ones with a credit card in reach.

That is the whole distinction. A top-of-funnel keyword (“what is project management”) is someone learning. A bottom-of-funnel keyword, sometimes called a buyer-intent, high-intent, commercial-intent, or transactional keyword, is someone deciding. Same person, months apart, and only one of those searches is close to revenue. Bottom-of-funnel keywords are where you point your effort, because they are the terms that still send a click and convert it.

Top-of-funnel keywords bring traffic. Bottom-of-funnel keywords bring buyers. In 2026 that gap is the whole game.

This is the highest-leverage slice of the broader B2B SaaS keyword research process. That guide is the full method, from head term to content plan. This one goes deep on one part of it: how to actually find the bottom-of-funnel terms, and why they are worth more than their search volume ever suggests.

Ask yourself when you last read a full web page start to finish that was not news. Really think about it. Almost the only time anyone reads a page all the way through anymore is when they are researching a purchase, reading reviews before they buy, or digging into a study they genuinely care about. Everything else, the quick “what is X” lookup, gets skimmed off an AI answer and closed without a click. That is exactly the behavior bottom-of-funnel keywords are built for: the person who is buying is the person still willing to click through and actually read the page.

The case for bottom-of-funnel keywords used to be “they convert better.” Now it is “they are the terms still worth targeting at all.” AI Overviews and ChatGPT answer the informational, top-of-funnel query on the spot, so the searcher never clicks. You can still rank a “what is X” page number one and watch the click never land, because Google read the answer aloud at the top of the page.

Bottom-of-funnel keywords resist that. A buyer comparing two platforms or checking pricing wants your actual page, not a synthesized paragraph, so the click survives even as informational traffic drains into the answer box. That is the reallocation behind the top-of-funnel-versus-bottom-of-funnel split and the wider decoupling of impressions from clicks: the money moved down the funnel, so your keyword targeting has to move with it. Chase volume at the top and you are optimizing for a click that no longer exists.

There is a deeper shift underneath this: volume matters less every year. Search is fragmenting into longer, more specific, more conversational queries, the exact long-tail variants AI has trained people to type and speak, so the fat head terms a keyword tool sorts by describe less and less of the real demand. Intent is the signal now, not the raw keyword. A few years ago you could win by matching a high-volume phrase; today that one phrase is a dozen longer variations, and the only thing tying them together is what the searcher is trying to do. Optimize for the intent behind the query and you cover the whole long tail at once. Keep sorting your list by exact-match volume and you are targeting a version of search that is already disappearing.

The shapes of a bottom-of-funnel keyword

Bottom-of-funnel keywords are recognizable. For B2B SaaS they cluster into a handful of repeatable patterns, and once you can see the shapes, you can build the list fast. Each of these is a buyer-intent keyword by construction: the phrasing itself tells you the searcher is shopping.

Category keywords ending in software, platform, or solution

“Project management software,” “expense management platform,” “help desk solution.” The category noun plus a buying word is the most common commercial-intent keyword there is. Someone typing “software” or “platform” is not writing a term paper, they are drawing up a shortlist. These are the terms your product and platform pages are built to win, and they usually carry the highest cost-per-click in the category because every competitor is bidding on them too.

”[Competitor] alternatives” keywords

“[Competitor] alternatives,” “alternatives to [competitor].” This is a buyer who has already decided the category is worth buying and is now actively shopping away from a specific tool, which makes it the highest-intent, most switch-ready query on the board. It is also the most underrated, because only vendors ever target it, so the difficulty is often near zero. On the accounts I run, “alternatives” terms routinely come back at keyword difficulty 0 to 1 with $28 to $41 cost-per-clicks: almost no ranking resistance and proven commercial value at the same time. That combination barely exists anywhere else in SEO.

”X vs Y” comparison keywords

“[Your product] vs [competitor],” “[competitor A] vs [competitor B].” A comparison query is a buyer down to a two- or three-tool shortlist, one decision away from a purchase. You win these with an honest comparison page that names a verdict, and you can rank for comparisons that do not even include your product by being the source that covers the matchup fairly. Comparison keywords are where a real point of view beats a feature table, because the searcher wants to be told which one to pick and why.

Pricing, demo, and ROI keywords

“[Category] pricing,” “[product] cost,” “[category] ROI calculator,” “book a demo.” These are the searches only a near-purchase buyer runs, so the intent could not be higher. Volume is tiny and that is fine, because almost everyone searching them is a live opportunity. A transparent pricing page and a real ROI tool win these, and they double as the first-party assets that earn citations elsewhere.

Use-case and “for [segment]” keywords

“Project management software for agencies,” “expense software for startups,” “help desk software for ecommerce teams.” Adding a segment qualifier narrows a broad category term into a specific buyer with a specific need, which is exactly what long-tail buyer intent looks like. These convert well because the specificity signals where the buyer is and what they need, and they match the longer, more specific queries buyers now type into AI tools.

Use cost-per-click as your buyer-intent signal

Here is the filter that matters more than volume: a high cost-per-click is the market telling you a keyword converts. Advertisers do not pay $19 a click out of habit. They pay it because the people typing that query buy, and the paid team has the conversion data to prove it. So when you are deciding whether a term is genuinely bottom-of-funnel, the CPC is a harder signal than the search volume.

Look at the numbers on the intent keywords themselves. Pulling live US data while writing this, “high intent keywords” carries a $19.47 CPC on 110 searches a month, and “transactional keywords” a $8.14 CPC at keyword difficulty 0. Those are not big-traffic terms. They are terms advertisers pay a premium to reach, which is the whole point: the value is in who searches, not how many.

A 110-volume keyword with a $19 CPC is worth more than a 100,000-volume term the AI Overview answers for free. Stop sorting by volume. Sort by intent, and let CPC prove it.

The “so what” is a scoring change. When you triage a keyword list, put a column for CPC next to volume and difficulty, and weight it. A low-difficulty, high-CPC term is the best target in SEO: cheap to rank for, and pre-validated as a converter by the people spending real money on it. That is a bottom-of-funnel keyword you build a page for today.

How to find bottom-of-funnel keywords

The shapes tell you what you are looking for. Here is the actual process I run to surface them, in rough order of leverage.

1. Start from competitor alternatives and comparison terms

Do not start from a seed term in a keyword tool. Start from your competitors. List every direct competitor, then generate the “[competitor] alternatives” and “[competitor A] vs [competitor B]” permutations across the set. This is the densest vein of bottom-of-funnel, buyer-intent keywords there is, and because only vendors target it, it is usually the least contested. You will build a longer high-intent list in twenty minutes here than in an hour of head-term brainstorming.

2. Mine the keywords advertisers already bid on

Your paid team, or your competitors’ paid teams, already did the intent research for you. Pull the paid keywords competitors run (Ahrefs and Semrush both expose this) and the high-CPC terms in your category. A keyword someone is actively paying for is a keyword with proven commercial intent, so treat the paid keyword list as a pre-vetted source of bottom-of-funnel terms to win organically. If your own company runs paid search, start there: the keywords with the best cost-per-opportunity in the ad account are your highest-priority organic targets.

3. Read the SERP for winnability and page type

Before you commit a term to the plan, run it in Google and read the results page, because the live SERP is the only current source of truth on intent and difficulty. Two things to note. First, the winning page type: if comparison pages and vendor listicles rank, a blog post will not dislodge them, so you build the format Google already rewards. Second, whether an AI Overview fires and how much organic click is left, because a term that still shows ten clean blue links is worth more of your effort than one the answer box has already eaten.

4. Mine review sites and communities

The exact language buyers use lives on G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, Reddit, and Quora, not in a keyword tool. Read the threads where your buyers compare tools and ask “what should I switch to,” and pull the real phrasings: the specific pain points, the competitor framings, the segment qualifiers. These are the same third-party sources AI pulls from to build its answers, so the terms you mine there are the terms that show up in both the SERP and the LLM.

5. Find striking-distance bottom-of-funnel terms you already rank for

The fastest wins are terms you already rank for at positions 5 to 20. Open Search Console, filter to the commercial queries (the shapes above), and find the ones with real impressions and few clicks. Those are one content improvement from page one, not a cold start. On a site with existing rankings, harvesting striking-distance bottom-of-funnel terms is almost always higher-ROI than chasing brand-new ones, because the hard part, being in the running at all, is already done.

Map each buyer-intent keyword to the right page type

Finding the keyword is half the job. The other half is pointing it at the page that can win it, and the SERP already told you which one. A “[competitor] alternatives” term wants a comparison page, not a blog post. A category “software” term wants a product or platform page. A “best [category] for [segment]” term wants an experienced listicle with a real methodology. Aim the wrong format at a term and it does not matter how good the page is, because you are fighting the results page instead of matching it.

This is where a lot of bottom-of-funnel keyword work quietly fails: the terms get found, then handed to a blog post by default because a blog post is easy to publish. Match the format Google rewards, then beat the ranking pages on depth and a point of view they do not have. And if the audit turns up two of your own pages already chasing the same alternatives or comparison term, that is cannibalization to consolidate, not another page to add. That format-matching discipline is the core of search intent, and it is exactly what a proper keyword audit surfaces: not just which terms to target, but which page has to change to win them.

From bottom-of-funnel keywords to bottom-of-funnel prompts

Keyword tracking is becoming prompt tracking, and the bottom-of-funnel logic carries straight over. Buyers now ask ChatGPT the same buying-moment questions they used to type into Google: “what’s the best project management tool for a small agency,” “alternatives to [competitor],” “is [product] worth it.” Those are bottom-of-funnel prompts, and being named in the answer to them is the new version of ranking for the keyword.

The catch is that prompts have no volume data yet, so you cannot size them the way you size keywords. The workaround is to build the prompt list from the buyer-intent keywords you already found, pairing each pain point and comparison with the natural-language phrasing a buyer would speak, and to track whether you are named on those prompts rather than guessing. Anchor the prompts to verified keyword demand, and you get a defensible bottom-of-funnel prompt set instead of a wish list.

Proof: tiny volume, largest demo channel

None of this is theory. On a legal SaaS account I run, the bottom-of-funnel terms carried the whole channel. A set of category listicles and comparison pages, the “[competitor] alternatives” and “best [category]” terms with individually small search volumes, drove organic to the single largest demo channel in the business: 362 influenced demos over six months, 29% of all demos, worth roughly $162,900 in influenced pipeline. The best month booked 92 organic demos.

If you had scored those keywords on volume, half of them would not have made the list. They were tiny. But they were the terms buyers searched right before a demo, and the pipeline proved it. That is the entire argument for bottom-of-funnel keywords in one account: the metric that pays is not how many people search a term, it is who searches it and what they do next. Measure the work in influenced pipeline, not traffic, and the low-volume, high-intent terms stop looking small. Leading with the bottom of the funnel is not a keyword tactic, it is the core of a modern SEO strategy: win the terms that convert first, then expand outward into the demand you have to create.

Bottom-of-funnel keywords FAQ

What are the 4 types of keywords?

The four keyword types, classified by search intent, are informational (learning: “what is a project management tool”), navigational (finding a specific site: “Asana login”), commercial (comparing before a decision: “best project management software”), and transactional (ready to act: “book a demo,” “pricing”). Commercial and transactional are the bottom-of-funnel, buyer-intent keywords that convert; informational is top-of-funnel and increasingly answered by AI Overviews without a click. For the full breakdown, see the four types of search intent.

What are high-intent keywords examples?

High-intent keyword examples are the buying-moment queries: “[competitor] alternatives,” “[product A] vs [product B],” “[category] software pricing,” “best [category] for [segment],” and “book a demo.” Each signals a searcher close to a decision rather than early research. A quick tell is a high cost-per-click: “high intent keywords” itself carries a $19.47 CPC, because advertisers only pay that when the term converts. If a query would make you money ranking number one for it every time, it is high-intent.

What is an example of bottom-of-funnel marketing?

A bottom-of-funnel marketing example is a comparison page that names a verdict between your product and a competitor, a “[competitor] alternatives” page that positions you as the switch, a transparent pricing page, or an ROI calculator, each aimed at a buyer who is already deciding rather than learning. In content terms, it is the page built to convert the searcher, not to attract a broad audience. The point is to meet the buyer at the moment of decision with the exact page they need to say yes.

What are the 3 C’s of search intent?

The three C’s of search intent are content type, content format, and content angle: what kind of page ranks (blog, product page, listicle), the specific format it takes (a how-to, a comparison, a listicle), and the angle that dominates the results. You read all three off the live SERP before you build, so you match the page Google already rewards. For bottom-of-funnel terms, the three C’s usually point at a comparison page, a product page, or a methodology-backed listicle, not a generic blog post.

Are bottom-of-funnel keywords worth targeting if the volume is low?

Yes, and low volume is often the point. Bottom-of-funnel keywords have small search volumes precisely because few people are at the buying moment at any given time, but the ones who are convert at a far higher rate than top-of-funnel searchers. Judge them on cost-per-click and downstream pipeline, not volume. On a legal SaaS account I run, terms with tiny individual volumes drove organic to the largest demo channel in the business, so the low numbers hid the highest-value traffic on the site.

What is considered the bottom of the funnel?

The bottom of the funnel is the buying stage, the point where someone has moved past learning and is actively choosing what to purchase. In keyword terms it is the commercial and transactional queries, “[competitor] alternatives,” “X vs Y,” “[category] pricing,” “book a demo”, where the searcher is comparing options or ready to act rather than researching a concept. Top of the funnel is awareness and education; the bottom is decision and purchase, which is why bottom-of-funnel keywords convert at a far higher rate even at lower volume.