Most comparison pages don't get you customers. Here's what the good ones do differently.

0:00Pull up a SaaS comparison page and you'll see that most of them look exactly the same. They all have a feature table where they win every row, they have some cool badges and some nice buttons to click on. The buyer looks at this, doesn't really trust it and closes the tab. I'll break down what the pages that actually convert do differently with real examples and the data behind them. I'm Deian, this is Before They Buy. If you're listening to this episode and you build comparison pages and followed the advice from episode 1,

0:32congratulations, it's probably ranking and it gets traffic. However, maybe nobody's really signing up from it and the conversion rate is really low. Here's what happened. You opened a spreadsheet, listed your features next to the competitor's features, gave yourself the checkmark in every row and gave them an X in most of them and then shipped it. The problem with this is that the buyer lands on the page and thinks, of course they say they win everything because it's their page. If we look at Coda.io, which makes really beautiful comparison pages,

1:04their competitor's name barely shows up in the hero section. If a buyer has 12 tabs open and they do, your page is the one that gets lost. Confluence does something even worse. Their comparison pages against Coda and against Quip use the same exact hero copy, word for word. They didn't even adjust the positioning to the specific competitors. So the buyer feels this. This page wasn't written for me, this was written for Google. The thing is that there's a case study that shows what happens to conversions once you fix this.

1:35Get uplift work with teamwork.com on their comparison pages and the results were pretty big. So let me get into the specifics. I mentioned Teamwork's results back in episode one. They increased conversions by 45% and signups by 172%. What I didn't tell you was what actually changed. GetUplift overhauled their comparison pages because the old ones were hidden in the footer. They were also very generic and didn't really have proper feature comparisons. Here's what pages do differently now. Number one is they lead with a specific

2:09angle, not just a generic claim. So Teamwork doesn't say we're the best project management tool. They're saying we're built for client service teams, which a real person hearing this would know that this is their problem. Basecamp does this against ClickUp as well. While ClickUp has more features, they lean into it. Basecamp has fewer features, and they lean into that. In this case, it works because Each page is written for its actual buyer, not every single buyer.

2:39Duda does the same thing against Squarespace. They don't say we are a better website builder. They say we are a better website builder for agencies. So they are leaning into the niche positioning. Number two is, they acknowledged what their competitors do well. If we look at Chili Piper's page against Calendly, they say something like, if you just want something small and simple, go with Calendly, don't choose us. While this might sound backwards, what it does is, it makes the buyer self-identify.

3:11The person who needs more than simple reads this and thinks, right, I do need more, but the person who wants basic scheduling leaves. Either way, you get a qualified lead or you stop wasting your sales team's time. The third thing is they used switching testimonials. So I mentioned this in the previous episode that generic customer quotes are not helpful. You need quotes from people who left the competitor. Unbounce, for example, fills their comparison pages with testimonials from people who switch from lead pages and why they left and what changed.

3:43Klaviyo goes even a step further because they pull migration guides onto their comparison page. So this tells the buyer the hardest part, which is moving, is already solved. Heap does something even more targeted. On their page against Pando, every testimonial specifically names Pando. One product manager talks about switching from Pando because they needed answers faster, so this kind of specificity lands harder than any feature table. Number four, they treated the features table as support, not the star.

4:17If you're looking at BambooHR's page against Namely, it doesn't even have a features table. It's literally just storytelling. So text blocks explaining why BambooHR is the better choice for growing companies. This is not necessarily the best call because Teamwork's new pages did include a side-by-side feature table, but it came after the emotional positioning. So instead of putting the table first, you first prepare the buyer with why you're a better choice. And by the time they hit the table, they have already decided.

4:49The table just confirms what they know. We're looking at GetUplift's research. We can see that most prospects evaluating project management software tested two to four solutions at the same time. So they do need the feature level comparison a table offers them, but they still need the story itself first. If you're now wondering if your comparison page is effective, here's a quick way to tell if it was built to convert or just built to rank. Open your comparison page and tell me this. Are you able to tell which competitor

5:19you're comparing against within two seconds of landing on the page? If the competitor page is buried below the fold, you've already lost a buyer with a dozen tabs open. Now swap the competitor's name for a different one. Does the page still make sense? If yes, your positioning is too generic. You just wrote a page about yourself and not a comparison. Now look at the feature table. Is every feature in your favor and you're just making the competitor look bad? Nobody's going to believe this. So the best comparison pages admit when the competitor is stronger and the buyer

5:53can trust the rest of the page. Now look at your testimonials. Are they all from happy customers or from customers who switch from the specific competitor? Because that's a big difference and generic quotes don't build trust. Finally, where are your comparison pages? Are they in the footer, hidden in some resource section or not even linked? If a buyer can't find it from your main navigation, it might as well not exist. Here's what I want you to do today. Open the best comparison page you have right now and run it through those checks.

6:24If it fails more than two, you don't have a comparison page, you just build a feature table with your logo on it. Pick one competitor page and rewrite the hero with specific positioning to that competitor. Then find a switching testimonial. If you don't have one, go ask your clients right now that's switched. Then move the page into your main navigation. This is just a morning's work and the difference between a page that ranks and one that converts is massive. This is Before They Buy. I'm Deian, see you next week.