Why "best [category] software" is a waste of your time

0:00Open your keyword tool. Type "best" and your category. "Best CRM software." "Best project management software." "Best email tool." Now look at the volume. Ten thousand searches a month. Twenty thousand. Your eyes light up, right?

0:18So you spend three months writing the page that targets it. And it never ranks. Not page one. Not page five. Three months, and that's the part that stings.

0:30Here's what we're going to do today. I'll show you who actually owns that search, why a new company can't win it, and the keywords you should chase instead.

0:43I'm Deian. This is Before They Buy.

0:45If you've dabbled in content, you've probably done exactly this. You opened a keyword tool, sorted by volume, and picked the biggest number you could find. "Best category software." Makes sense. Big volume, big traffic, big win. Sound familiar?

1:05Here's what you didn't check. Who's already sitting on that page.

1:10So you wrote your post. Maybe it was good. You hit publish, waited, checked your rank. Nothing. And you told yourself it needs time.

1:20It doesn't need time. Back in episode ten I cited an Ahrefs study. The average page sitting at number one in Google is five years old. Five years. Five years old, which is honestly wild when you think about what you're up against. You're not behind by a few months. You're behind by years, against sites with budgets you don't have. "Give it time" is basically the story you tell yourself so you don't have to admit the keyword was wrong.

1:55That's not bad luck. That's the system working as designed. You picked the one keyword a small, new company has almost no chance of winning.

2:06Now, there's a two-person team that went from 143 monthly visitors from Google to over 7,000 in ten months. They did it by ignoring the head term completely. I'll get to them in a minute.

2:21Let's look at who you're actually up against. SISTRIX pulled the top domains for CRM searches. This is UK Google data, but the pattern holds everywhere.

2:33So here's the actual top of that page. Salesforce and HubSpot, real vendors. Then PCMag. Then G2. Software Advice. Forbes. Only four of the top ten are software vendors at all. The other six are review sites and tech publishers. Keep scrolling and you hit Zapier and TechRadar. More publishers, stacked on top of the few vendors who made it.

3:00PCMag's "best software" section alone pulls more than a million organic visits a month, and that's UK traffic alone. One directory, on one publisher. You are not displacing that with a blog post.

3:15G2 is worse. It lists 864 CRM vendors on its category pages. 864. That number is just absurd. That's the whole business, a ranking page for every category and every sub-segment, built over years of links. You have one product and a few months of content. The aggregator was built to win the exact search you're fighting for.

3:41And here's the part that should end the debate. The vendors who do rank for "CRM" are Salesforce, Zoho, Microsoft, right? They don't rank with their product page. They rank with a "What is CRM" guide. Even the giants don't win the head term with a page that sells anything.

4:02Now let's talk about your odds. That same Ahrefs study tracked a million new pages for a full year. Only 1.74% of them cracked the top ten. I didn't mention this in episode ten, but the high-volume keywords take the longest to rank of all. The exact ones you're chasing.

4:24Think of keyword difficulty like a speed limit. Ahrefs put it this way. The number on the sign is the same for everyone. Whether you can hit it depends on what you're driving. Forbes is in a Formula 1 car. A new SaaS is on a bicycle. The limit doesn't move. Your ability to reach it does.

4:47You're on the bicycle. "Best category software" is the highway.

4:52Plausible Analytics is a web analytics tool. Two people. Marko Saric on marketing, Uku Täht on the product. Bootstrapped, zero marketing budget.

5:03In March 2020 they got 143 visitors from Google. Ten months later, over 7,000 a month. All organic. All free. I love this example, because it's about as small a starting point as you can get.

5:18And this wasn't a content factory. Thirty-two blog posts over the whole stretch, plus fifteen product pages. A two-person team can write thirty-two posts. So the constraint was never effort. It was aiming the effort at the right searches.

5:37Now here's what they never did. They never wrote a page targeting "best web analytics software." Not once. They went after the specific stuff instead. "Google Analytics alternative." "How to remove Google Analytics." "GDPR-compliant analytics." "Web analytics without cookies." Real problems, named tools, narrow searches.

6:02Now the honest part, because Marko said it himself. Most of their traffic came from people searching their brand name directly. His words: "It is easier to build brand awareness than it is to build Google rankings." So the long-tail content didn't conjure an audience out of nothing. It caught the audience that word of mouth was already sending.

6:30That's the link to last episode. I said word of mouth still needs Google pages. Well, this is what those pages look like. Not a page fighting for "best analytics software." A page that's there when someone who already heard your name types something specific.

6:50I can already hear three things you're thinking right now.

6:55First one. "The head term has ten thousand searches a month." Sure. But volume you can't capture is worth zero. You're weighing ten thousand searches you'll never rank for against five hundred you will. And the specific search converts better anyway. Conductor studied seven million visits. It's older research, but the dynamic hasn't changed. Long-tail searches converted two and a half times higher than head terms. Think about the person typing "CRM for real estate agents." They're closer to buying than the person typing "best CRM."

7:37Second one. "I should at least try." Actually, every hour on a keyword you can't win is an hour off a page you could, and that's the part that drives me nuts. Plausible never spent that hour. They didn't try and fail at the head term. They skipped it.

7:57Third one. "My competitor ranks for it, so I should too." Go check whose page is actually ranking. If it's G2 or Forbes or PCMag, that's not a competitor beating you. That's an aggregator beating everyone. You don't out-rank G2. You get listed on G2, and spend your own time where you can actually win.

8:21So what do you chase? Forget the category. Go narrow. Here are five types.

8:26One. Use-case keywords. Not "best invoicing software," but "invoicing software for freelancers." Lower volume, far higher intent, a beatable page.

8:38Two. Persona keywords. "CRM for real estate agents." "Time tracking for agencies." The buyer reads the title and sees their own job.

8:48Three. Problem keywords. The exact pain your product fixes. "Track external link clicks." "Send invoices in multiple currencies." That's basically how Plausible grew.

9:02Four. Integration keywords. "Your tool plus Slack." "Invoicing that syncs with QuickBooks." Zapier built a moat on tens of thousands of integration pages, which is kind of staggering. You can't beat all of them. But you can own the handful that touch your own product.

9:23Five. Alternative keywords. "Incumbent alternative." I covered the full playbook on those in episode seven, so go back to that one.

9:33Now here's how to find the winnable ones in five minutes. Omid Ghiam, who runs Marketer Milk, does this. In your keyword tool, filter for terms where the pages already ranking have a domain rating under fifteen. His logic is simple. If low-authority pages already rank for it, you can too. And if the front page is all Forbes and G2, walk away.

10:00Go open your keyword tool right now. Type the "best category" term you've been eyeing. Look at the top ten. Count how many are review sites and publishers. Be honest about the number.

10:15Then do the opposite. Find one specific, narrow keyword where the ranking pages are small sites like yours. Write that page first. I like this exercise because it's so quick to run.

10:29So that's the difference between traffic you'll never get and traffic you can own by next quarter.

10:37This is Before They Buy. I'm Deian. See you next week.