How many keywords should I track?

Rank-tracking limits are the SEO industry’s favorite upsell lever (tiers jump from 250 to 1,500 to 5,000 tracked keywords), which makes it worth saying plainly. Tracked keywords are a watchlist, not a strategy, and most sites watch too many. Here is the portfolio that earns its slots. One primary keyword per money page (the query that page exists to win), one or two meaningful variants for your most important pages, your brand terms (early warning for reputation and competitor poaching), and a handful of competitive benchmarks you check weekly with intent to act.

The redundancy most people miss is simple. Google Search Console already records your position for every query you appear in, free, including thousands of long-tails no tracker tier would cover. Its data is averaged and sampled rather than the daily location-specific snapshot trackers provide, but for the question "is this cluster trending up?", GSC answers without consuming a slot. Paid tracking adds what GSC lacks. Daily granularity, local results (the pizzeria needs "pizza brooklyn" tracked in Brooklyn, not nationally), clean competitor comparisons, and alerting.

A sizing heuristic holds up well. Track 10 percent of your indexed pages, with a floor of 20 and a sanity ceiling around 500 for anything short of enterprise. Review the list quarterly and prune what you never act on. A watchlist you skim past is noise with a subscription fee. And if slot limits are genuinely binding, that is the signal to check SE Ranking’s flexible tracking tiers before paying suite prices for watch-capacity you will not use.