Blog · July 5, 2026
How many keywords should you track?
Most sites should track between 50 and 500 keywords. A local business is usually well covered at 50 to 150, an SMB or SaaS at 150 to 500, and ecommerce or large content sites at 500 to 5,000. The right number follows from your pages and markets, not from a plan's ceiling.
Here is a sizing framework you can apply in an afternoon: what drives the count, ranges by site type, and the one distinction that keeps the list honest.
What actually drives the number
A tracked keyword should map to a page you care about and a query someone actually types. The count therefore scales with four things:
- Pages that earn money: each core service, product category, or landing page deserves 3 to 10 query variants.
- Locations: every city or service area multiplies your local terms ("plumber austin", "plumber round rock").
- Competitors you watch: the keywords where you benchmark against others need to be in the set on purpose.
- Content you publish: each pillar article earns its primary term plus a couple of secondary phrasings.
Ranges by site type
| Site type | Keywords | What fills the set |
|---|---|---|
| Local business | 50 to 150 | Services × locations, "near me" variants, brand terms |
| SMB / SaaS | 150 to 500 | Product terms, feature pages, comparisons, top blog queries |
| Ecommerce / content site | 500 to 5,000 | Category pages first, hero products, seasonal terms, pillar content |
| Agency (per client) | 100 to 500 | The client's money terms plus the competitor benchmark set |
These are working ranges, not rules. A single-location dentist genuinely needs 40 keywords; a marketplace with 200 categories in 3 countries genuinely needs 4,000. What the ranges guard against is the two failure modes: tracking 15 keywords and calling it visibility, or tracking 20,000 and reading none of them. Both failure modes cost the same thing, which is trust in the numbers, and once a team stops trusting the tracker the whole exercise is decoration.
Money keywords vs vanity keywords
The most important cut is not volume, it is intent. A money keyword is one where a ranking change moves revenue: "emergency plumber austin", "crm for real estate agents", your top category terms. A vanity keyword is broad, impressive, and commercially empty: a generic head term you will never convert from, or a definition query three steps from purchase.
Build the list money-first: if a keyword dropped five spots tomorrow and nobody would need to do anything, it does not belong in the daily set. Vanity terms can live in a small "watch" group, useful for the trend line and for share of voice math, but they should never crowd out the terms that pay. Every tracked keyword also gets a location and device context in a proper keyword position tracking setup, so one phrase tracked in two cities counts as two slots. Budget for that.
Signs your set is the wrong size
Too small shows up in Search Console: if most of your organic clicks come from queries you do not track, your tracker is reporting on a minority of your traffic and a real drop can hide in the untracked majority. It also shows up in meetings, when someone asks about a keyword and the honest answer is "we do not watch that one".
Too big shows up in your own behavior. Alerts arrive daily and get archived unread. The report is forty pages and nobody scrolls past page two. A keyword drops for three weeks before anyone mentions it, even though the tracker flagged it on day one. At that point the tracker is a data warehouse, not a warning system, and cutting the set in half would genuinely improve detection.
A useful audit ritual: once a quarter, sort tracked keywords by "last time this number changed a decision". Keywords with no answer get demoted to the watch list. Sets that get pruned stay read.
A 30-minute sizing exercise
- List every page that earns money. Give each 3 to 10 real query variants.
- Multiply local terms by service area.
- Pull your top 50 queries by clicks from Search Console and add any you missed.
- Add the terms where you benchmark competitors.
- Cut everything you could not act on. The remainder is your number.
While you are at it, group the survivors with tags: by product line, by location, by funnel stage. A tagged set of 300 reads like six sets of 50, and when something drops you immediately know which part of the business is affected. Untagged sets are where keywords go to be forgotten.
Mapping the number to a tracker tier
Keyword allowances are how every rank tracker prices, so your sizing exercise is also your budget. Serpstracker's planned tiers follow the same brackets as the table above: Starter at $39/mo covers 250 keywords, which fits nearly any local business or small SMB; Growth at $99/mo covers 1,500 for multi-market SMBs and small ecommerce; Agency at $249/mo covers 5,000 across unlimited sites. The full breakdown is on the rank tracker pricing page, and early-access members lock in launch pricing.
Start at the bottom of your range. It is easier to add 100 keywords you miss than to weed out 1,000 you never read.