What should you build first if you have zero marketing budget?

0:00Last week, I gave you the five pages every SaaS company needs. Comparison pages, alternatives pages, use case pages, free tools, and glossary pages. The first question I'd ask is, which one do I build first? If you're bootstrapped, you can't build all five at once. You don't have a marketing team and you don't have an ad budget. You're also not an agency. It's just you and a blank page. In this episode, I'll give you the order and the data behind it.

0:30I'm Deian, and this is Before They Buy. Only 1.74% of new pages reach Google's top 10 within a year. That's an Ahrefs study across over a million pages that came to this conclusion. The average page that ranks number one is around five years old. If you build the wrong page first, you wait months for results that never come. You also burn the little energy you have on content that gets traffic, but doesn't get your customers. Grow and Convert tracked this across 17 clients over two years.

1:02In articles targeting comparison and alternative keywords ranked in days, not months. It only took them a few days. One page hit position 2 in seven days. Another one, position 1 in only four days. And the third one reached position 1 in three days. The same study showed that higher volume keywords took 3 to 5 months to reach top 3, the kind of keywords most content strategies target first. But the thing is that you don't have three to five months. You need results

1:32as quickly as possible, and that changes what you should build first. If you've listened to my podcast, you've heard me cite 8.43% before. That's the conversion rate for comparison and alternative keywords across Grow & Convert study of 95 articles. So the use case keywords that they tracked converted in 2.77%, which is still strong, but compared to the comparison pages, those convert three times higher than use case keywords. This is why I recommend that you build them first. They have the highest conversion

2:05rate, the keyword difficulty is very low, and you're very fast to rank. If we look at Circuit, which is a delivery route tool I mentioned in episode 2, Grow & Convert built six comparison pages for them, and every targeted keyword with less than 20 monthly searches made a really big impact. Although your average SEO tool said it's not really worth targeting. All six ranked in the top five and the fastest hit position one in only three days. They were measuring over a period of two years that those six pages drove in

2:37total 149 organic signups and one page converted at 4.5%. So if we look at this, only six pages with basically no budget to build in an afternoon brought 149 organic signups. The part that really matters is that if you're a small SaaS company, nobody knows your name yet. Companies like Signaturely, which you probably know because they do e-signatures, had zero funding in the beginning and they were competing against big companies

3:08like Adobe Sign, PandaDoc, Docusign and so on. Nobody searched Signaturely versus Docusign because the brand was just too small. Luckily, they wrote competitor versus competitor comparison pages. So Docusign versus Adobe Sign. and as I mentioned in a different episode, they used a piggyback strategy. So you put yourself into the comparison of larger companies that people know. In this case, DocuSign versus Adobe Sign was a keyword of 2,900 searches per month.

3:42Signaturely ranked number one for that search term and they captured the featured snippet. In 12 months, they managed to get 30,000 sign-ups all from this one page. So as you can see, you don't really need brand recognition, you just need to build a comparison page. And you need to show up where buyers are already looking, even if they don't know you exist. Alternatives pages are in the same high-intent family. The search is a bit different and the format is different because it's usually the term of the competitor. So let's say docusign and then you add alternatives to it. So it's more of a

4:17listicle where you position yourself among the options. So someone searching for DocuSign alternatives has already decided that they might want to leave DocuSign, they're unhappy about something and they just want to see what else is out there. The conversion poll on alternatives keywords is what drives the 8.43% average I mentioned earlier. Alternative searches convert higher than the versus keywords alone because the intent is just sharper. So the buyer isn't comparing just two options they've already rejected one and want replacements i recommend

4:49that you build one alternatives page for your top competitor this afternoon the use case pages are also very interesting so they're structured in a way like your product and then you add who it is for so for example signaturely for marketing agencies or for e-commerce or for accountants. These pages convert at 2.77%, a little bit lower than comparison pages, but they also have a short sales cycle. Josiah Roach built use case pages by persona and cut average sales cycle from 21 to only 9 days.

5:25It comes in my list as third just because it requires a little bit more thinking. You need to pick the right customer segment. And comparison pages are formulaic, while use case pages need specific persona research. So you need to check what marketing agencies are actually looking for before you build it. And the next page is the glossary page or a cluster of glossary pages and this is usually top of the funnel what is whatever your core term is what is a glossary for example this

5:56catches buyers very early in their journey so someone looking for what is route optimization doesn't know that the company circuit exists yet but they're learning the language of that category a glossary page answers their question and introduces your product as the solution but the biggest problem I'm seeing is that most SaaS companies build very generic glossaries. So you're just competing with every other company about very generic terms. You have to make it more specific to your product and don't go too generic on

6:26the glossary and too top of the funnel. Of course, glossary pages have way lower conversion rates than comparison pages. But they also build topical authority and they help interlink the rest of your website. So you can link the comparison pages to it, alternatives pages and any other page that you have. And finally, the one that has the high ceiling is a free tool. Signaturely built a signature maker that brought them 180,000 visitors every month. And on top of that, they also got 3,000 backlinks from over 400 sites.

6:58So those obviously boosted their domain authority which helped with comparison pages ranking a bit higher so there's a compounding loop that i talked about in episode nine obviously back in the days this required development time but now with ai if you use cloud for example a calculator or a grader isn't that much of a deal anymore you have to test it and you have to make sure it actually works properly, but it doesn't take that long to generate anymore. Back in episode 9, I mentioned Tim Hansen, the CMO at Pentren.

7:32He described his build order in detail, and he said he always built sales pages first, probably have something like this already, then the comparison content, followed by alternatives and roundups. His second step is what I recommend your first step to be. Because his client got 40% fewer visitors, but three times more revenue within 60 days. Unfortunately, what I'm seeing right now as a trend, especially on X with bootstrapped SaaS founders, is that they go the old school way of as many visitors as possible,

8:06but then they see really low conversion rates. The thing is, you should invest your time in building as little pages as possible and have really targeted traffic, because every page you build should be aimed at someone who is ready to buy. From last week's episode, I also mentioned Geekbot who did the same thing. They started with the bottom of funnel content first, writing a single awareness article. And then they had 22 Bofo articles that generated 77% of their conversions from just 12% of the total traffic.

8:37They also wrote Tofu articles that got seven times more visitors, but way fewer signups. The next step is to build a comparison page. Pick one competitor, make really honest positioning about what they do and what they do differently, and who each tool is best for. If nobody searches your name yet, you can use the playbook that I mentioned earlier, which is the piggyback strategy, write the comparison between your two biggest competitors and rank for that search term and put yourself in this conversation as an alternative option.

9:08This page will convert better than every blog post you could write this month combined. You might be asking, what if the search volume is too low? As I've mentioned earlier, Circuits comparison pages targeted keywords with fewer than 20 monthly searches, but those tools don't really tell the full story, because the six pages got 149 signups. Here's what I want you to do today. Open a blank page and write your top competitors' names at the top. Write what buyers should know when comparing them to you and be honest about what they do well.

9:40Be very specific why you're different. This is your comparison page that you can publish today and could rank within a week. Next week, write the alternatives page. And the week after, build a use case page. And by the end of the month, you have three of the five pages that you need to be successful. and the ones that also convert the highest. For a SaaS company, you don't need a massive marketing budget. You just need pages that catch buyer at the moment they're actually deciding. Hit the comparison page today. This is Before They Buy. I'm Deian. See you next week.