Your competitor has a page comparing themselves to you. You don't.

0:00Go google your product name right now. Add vs after it and look what auto fills. If your competitor built a page for that search and you didn't, they're telling your buyer why their thing is better. And you're not even in the room at this point. I'll show you the data on why this is the highest converting page you can build and exactly what goes on such a page. I'm Deian, this is Before They Buy. This is what's actually happening today. Someone's evaluating your product right now.

0:35They typed your brand versus the competitor into Google and that search happens whether you like it or not. Three things can show up when someone is searching. Either it's your competitor's page, they wrote this, they picked which features to compare and they framed their strengths against your gaps. You can't even respond to any of this. The other thing is it's a site like G2, Capterra. The entire business is ranking for software brand names. They literally call it brand squatting.

1:08So your product shows up with state pricing, maybe a checkbox feature list somebody filled in two years ago and descriptions that have nothing to do with what anyone actually buys. The third thing is an affiliate blog. Things like you've seen probably dozens of times like top 10 tools 2026 for a specific category. This is usually written by someone who's never logged into any of those products. They also don't care about accuracy. They don't care about accuracy. They only care about the referral click.

1:43But this is everything your buyers read. That's the only story they get. And here's one thing you shouldn't remember. There's a company that figured out how to use this exact gap to grow from 2 million to 6 million in annual recurring revenue. Their co-founders said something about it that changed how I think about comparison pages. Powered by Search put it very plainly. If you don't create competitor comparison pages, your competitors will and they will dictate the narrative of your brand. This is not a marketing opinion. It's not something I made up.

2:16It's literally what is happening right now. Let's look at some numbers. Grow and Convert tracked 95 articles across their SaaS clients. What they measured were 123,000 organic page views. And they led to 4,687 conversions. These are not just projects. These are not just projections. These are real signups they measured. Another thing they measured were that alternative and comparison keywords, so searches like,

2:48brand alternative and x versus y converted at 8.43%. If we look specifically at versus keywords, they converted at 5.45%. And category keywords, for example, project management software converted at 4.85%. Now if you compare this to just regular blog content, it looks quite different. Geekbot tracked that their own numbers through grow and convert converted 2400 better if.

3:22Geekbot tracked their own numbers through grow and convert and they were looking specifically at their bottom of funnel polls which converted 2400 better than top of funnel stuff so if you have a content agency that wants to write very generic blog polls like five tips for better remote collaboration, then just remember that a comparison page outperforms it by an order of magnitude. Because people searching for you versus competitor aren't browsing at this point.

3:52They're already in the mode to decide. They want something to pick and they need the reason to make that choice. Backstage SEO had a client build about 50 comparison pages and those pages brought in a thousand to two thousand visits a month and the conversion rate was somewhere between five to ten percent. They also ran the math on what this looks like. Like imagine you have a $500 per month product with 25 comparison pages. In about three years you get a return of $243,000 and you only invested around $89,000.

4:28If you want some real examples of who's done this we can just look Look at ClickUp. They build comparison pages for every major competitor. This is Monday, Asana, Jira, Basecam and so on. They bootstrap to 20 million annual recurring revenue in only two years. Each of their pages target specifically the competitor term versus ClickUp. And this pulls in thousands of visits every single month. Everything is organic.

4:59Everything is from people who are ready to choose between these tools. If we look at Missive, which is bootstrapped by just three founders, they were sitting at 2 million ARR a couple of years ago. And as of early 2026 they are already three times higher their co-founder said something their co-founder said something i think about a lot if we're honest in the reviews we will attract the right customers and those who need something else will go elsewhere so they

5:29actually tell you what competitors do better and people trust them for it, If we look at Storylane, they went from 25,000 to over 150,000 monthly visitors in only 6 months. They built thousands of tutorial and how-to pages programmatically. So these are interactive demos for popular tools, and they became the go-to result for searches people were already making. Teamwork.com hired GetUplift to rework their comparison pages.

6:01The result is pretty cool. They got 45% more conversions, but also 170% more signups from the highest value segment. And none of these companies have 50% marketing teams. Missive, for example, is still just three people. One thing I keep hearing is pushback from founders. Either it feels sleazy, which it doesn't really, or they think like good comparison pages are like fancy ads.

6:31Well, Missive acknowledges what competitors do better. That's why people believe them when they say what they do better. Metadata's page, again, Sixth Sense, literally says the two tools are complementary. So apples to oranges? User evidence compares itself to TechValidate. The founders used to even work at TechValidate. They still say what it does well. So the problem isn't really that you frame your comparison pages as an ad. It's just that the worst comparison pages are the ones that pretend that competitors don't exist.

7:06And the good ones are super honest about everything on the whole site. Another thing founders say all the time is that they don't want to give them free publicity. I mean, you're not introducing anyone to your competitor because by the time someone lands on these pages, the person is already searching for them, they already know them and you're either in that conversation and shape the narrative or you're not. And the other small pushback I always hear is that we're just too small for

7:37this, which is backwards thinking. For example, Groove is a tiny helpdesk software, yet they still build a comparison page against Zendesk. It worked because prospects were already considering both and Groove gave them a reason to look closer. You're not saying that you're the bigger company, you're just saying you're different. Let's look at what goes on the actual page. Start with the bias problem. Not why you are such a great company. If you're looking at a signer's comparison page against Monday,

8:09it reads like a buyer's guide. They are writing something like, here's what you should evaluate, not why we win in this specific case. Acknowledge what the competitor does well, and I know that sounds really wrong, but buyers can smell that you are bullshitting them. And the moment you do, and the moment they do, they stop trusting everything else on the page. You should also put numbers on it. Don't just say we are faster, but say you can save 7% or we are 8 times faster in this specific use case scenario.

8:46You should also put testimonials from people who switch to your software on the page, not just generic customer quotes that are not really relevant. Klaviyo, for example, puts migration guides right on their comparison pages. It's a great signal because people like the person who's visiting this page already made the choice to switch. The next element is the comparison table. It should be a nice side-by-side view, very visible, very scannable for humans and AI alike.

9:16And the next step is the call to action. And here you have to be really specific. Either it's a demo, either it leads to the trial, or it leads to some kind of call. Make the choice and stick with it don't confuse leads with multiple choices and don't build a page that convinces someone and then gives them nowhere to go and one more thing unbounce found that landing pages written at the fifth or seventh grade reading

9:47level convert at 12.9 percent if you're writing professional level copy this drops to only two percent so write as simply as possible Your buyers aren't stupid, but they're skimming. They're looking at maybe 10 different comparison pages and they don't have the time to figure out your complicated copy. Here's what I want you to do today. Open up Google, type your product name, space, VS, and look at the autofill.

10:19Click through the first three results and see what's leading to. Click through the first three results and see where it goes. If your competitor has a page and you don't, then you've identified a gap. High intent traffic, reading someone, somebody else's take on your product. Start building one comparison page for just a single competitor. Have honest positioning and a very clear way to sign up. Start a trial or book a call. That's the single highest ROI page you can ship this month.

10:52This is Before They Buy. I'm Deian. See you next week.