People are searching "[your category] alternatives" right now. Are you showing up?

0:00Type Photoshop Alternatives into Google. Thousands of people do it every single month. They're not using Photoshop Review and not Photoshop Pricing. Alternatives. They've already decided they want something else. Place Photoshop with your product category. This search is happening right now and if you're not showing up, someone else is taking that buyer. I'm Deian and this is Before They Buy. Asana Alternative gets over 2,400 searches a month. Photoshop alternative gets 27 000 a

0:33month every sas category has some sort of version of this specific search and most companies including yours have zero pages targeting it here's what happens when someone types your category alternatives into google they usually get a listicle from a blog that makes money on affiliate links the writer hasn't used any of those tools and they ranked every product based on who pays the highest commission. So your product might be on that list it might also not be. Either way you're

1:03not controlling the story. The other thing that happens is they get on G2 where the data is often stale if you don't own the profile and then you have all kinds of checkbox features someone entered two years ago but hasn't really updated. There's also no context at all of why anyone actually switches. But here's the worst thing of all your prospect gets your competitors page looking for category alternative here's why we're better they wrote the narrative and

1:34you're not controlling it. There's a company where one person, actually one marketer, built 35 pages targeting these exact searches and scaled traffic to 100,000 visits a month. I'll get into that. But first, what are these searches actually worth? I've talked about growing converts conversion data before in my episodes. I keep coming back to it because nothing else came close. So there's, again, the study mentioned 95 articles and 123,000 page views that found that alternatives and comparison keywords convert at around 8.43%.

2:09If you put that into context, category keywords like best project management software converted 4.85%, which is still pretty good. But again, alternative keywords are nearly double that. So the person searching Asana alternatives is further along than the person searching for best project management tools, because they've already done their research, or they might be a customer of Asana that isn't happy. Here's a part that really kills the low-volume excuse.

2:40It's the same study, and they tracked six comparison articles for one client. Every article had less than 20 reported monthly searches, according to those SEO tools and APIs. Which means the numbers are quite small, right? Well, the six articles drove 149 organic signups. So search volume is a lie about commercial intent keywords these tools tell us. They undercount and the actual traffic and conversions are often multiplies

3:11of what the tool says it is. It also happens with zero volume keywords. You would probably never target them and I usually recommend don't necessarily prioritize them but keep them in mind. Like I would go for low volume first and then also test the zero volume keywords because they might not give you 149 organic signups but they might give you 20 organic signups. Now, Josh Spilker, who was the sole marketer at ClickUp when the company was very small and only had like 15 people and no content team,

3:43no agency, just one person, he built 35 competitor comparison landing pages. So these pages were, for example, Monday.com alternative, Asana alternative. Each one had a dedicated page on ClickUp.com slash compare. I've brought up ClickUp before because their comparison pages are pretty interesting, but what I haven't told you is that Josh's strategy was middle of the funnel first. He said, focus on the middle first, then bottom, then top.

4:16And alternative pages are somewhere in the middle. People who already know the category and are actively comparing. The results are pretty good because ClickUp scaled to 100k organic visits a month and And their main traffic puller was actually the monday.com comparison page, which is 31% of their traffic in the comparison folder. Eventually, they raised a lot of money and have a really big valuation right now. So the core of what got them there were the alternatives pages.

4:47At that time, ClickUp also had what some might consider a disadvantage because their domain rating was way lower than that of the competitors, which was only 83. while Asana had 89 and Monday had a DR of 88. But again, they won the keywords anyway because alternatives pages aren't necessarily about authority but about showing up with the right answer for the right search. Now, ClickUp is and was at that time a growing brand. So what about smaller

5:19companies that nobody heard of? Going back to Grow & Convert, who worked with a remote executive assistant service that had a very small DR of 28 and tiny company, basically no brand recognition. They published five comparison articles targeting alternative keywords and all five of those ranked in the top three of Google within weeks. It didn't take them months to do this. The good news was that their competitors slept on this and didn't create comparison content so the door was wide open and they just used it.

5:50So even a small unknown company can win these searches if they pay attention to what is available and what people have not tapped into yet. There's also another angle that works here and this is, what I've also mentioned in the previous episode, three-way comparisons. This is really good especially if you're a small brand. Basically you insert yourself into a search between two bigger competitors. So build a page like toggle versus clockify versus your brand people already search for toggle and clockify because they're big and known you're

6:22just adding yourself into the conversation that exists an seo agency did this for a time tracking client and they rank within weeks now some sas founders will say nobody's really searching for us and that's the point nobody has to be searching for you they're searching for alternatives to your competitor and even if they don't know about you you now show up in the results and this is how you make yourself known. Others say, but the volume is too low. I just showed you. Six articles with under 20 monthly searches drove 149 signups.

6:54So don't just look at the low reported volume because it doesn't mean it's exact and will give you low results. The keywords convert at a much higher rate than category keywords, for example. So you need fewer visitors to get the same number of customers. If your concern is that you don't have the resources to do this, then think back at Josh Spellker from ClickUp. One page for competitor, you just build a nice clear layout. The competitor does what you do differently, what each tool is best for.

7:25It's not really a massive content project. It's just sitting down, building a template, doing the research, and in a focused afternoon, you're going to have the page ready to go but the biggest concern i've heard is that you will send traffic to the competitor my answer to this is simply no because the person researching is already, aware of your competitor they know who they are that's why they are searching for alternatives, so they want to most likely leave them you're just giving them somewhere to go to.

7:59Now here's your playbook. List your top three competitors that your customers mention during sales calls or that get mentioned in contact forms when someone reaches out. For each one of those, search the competitor name and alternatives and competitor versus. Look what shows up. If it's some kind of affiliate blog or G2 pages, you just found open real estate basically. Build one page for every competitor and put the following on it. Start with the headline.

8:31The headline should be simple. Competitor name, alternative for your niche. So don't do competitor versus you, because the person searching alternatives has already decided to leave. So you need to speak to that decision they are making. Next, lead with the buyer's problem. Why are people actually looking for alternatives in the first place? So this you can look up maybe on reddit or on g2 find reviews and see filtered by the negative emotions and see why are they leaving it

9:01can be something they did recently maybe some update maybe a price hike something like that don't use why your product is great on this page more like why the competitor falls short for a specific use case in the next section show why you do it differently this can be two to three features don't do a full feature dump because it's going to be very difficult for people to understand the features that really matter to that specific frustrated person with your competitor now you need some social proof and the testimonial has to be

9:35from someone who switched if you have one don't put a generic customer quote there because the proof has to tip the decision in your favor and it only works if someone has switched. Next is the comparison. Create a table, keep it honest, make sure you research the features properly and don't skew them in your favor just because you have more checkboxes to check. And finally, there has to be a proper next step after your table. There are three options that I usually recommend, either a demo,

10:08a trial or some sort of call. But don't convince someone that you are the right choice and then there's no way to go next from there. Start searching for alternatives right now on google and see what comes up search for the biggest competitor you have and put the keyword alternatives after it right now just see what comes up and if you're not on that page then you're invisible to the most motivated buyers in your market build that page today just for one competitor and see what happens

10:39within the next few weeks this is Before They Buy i'm dayan see you next week.