You need 5 pages. Here's what they are.

0:00For the last 8 episodes I've been walking you through one page type at a time. Comparison pages, glossary pages, free tools, use case pages and alternative pages. Nobody tells you this part. Each one works on its own, but they were never meant to work alone. I'll show you what happens when you build them as a set, and the companies using that portfolio to print organic revenue while their competitors block into the void. I'm Deian and this is Before They Buy.

0:31Most SaaS marketing teams pick a single page type and just make a bet. We're going to double down on comparison. Double down on comparison pages this quarter, or we need to launch a glossary, or everyone has a calculator, so we should build one too. What most of the time happens is that you just ship it, it usually ranks and pulls some traffic in, but then the graph flatlines, and worst of all, you might not get any leads or prospects.

1:03Because your buyer doesn't decide in one single search, They Google your category, they read a definition, they check out a competitor, and they search for alternatives or use a calculator. Eventually, they will circle back to a use case page, and this is what a buyer is. They did like five different searches. If you just build a single page, you showed up once, while your competitor showed up five times. Tim henson is the cmo tim henson is the cmo at pen friend and one of his clients

1:36spent a hundred thousand pounds on content from three different agencies the traffic spiked to two thousand to, two hundred thousand a month but three months later it crashed hard and his line was what he was saying about it was that the bank doesn't care about traffic it cares about deposits that's what one-off pages feel like at the bank. They are spikes without deposits. So in the past, I've talked about five different types of pages. Comparison pages I mentioned in episode one and three of my podcast.

2:10And I've also told you that Grow and Convert tracked 95 articles across SaaS clients. And the comparison on alternative keywords converted at over 8%. I also mentioned alternative pages in episode seven. So it's basically the keyword the keyword is basically the competitor name alternatives the cool thing about this is that the buyer has already decided to leave so they want to replace this specific software or the service and it's a very high intent searched volume and term

2:45number three are use case pages that i mentioned in episode six this can be your product for marketing agency or e-commerce or sales team and so on. Number four are free tools that I talked about in episode five. For example, I mentioned HubSpot's website grader that generated millions of leads. And number five are glossary pages that I mentioned in episode four. Glossary pages can be what is a specific term, for example, what is client portal

3:17software for marketing agencies. so it has to be also very specific. Each of these pages catches a specific moment. So the glossary is what is this? The calculator, how much would this cost me? The use case, does this work for my situation? The comparison page, is this better than what I have? Alternatives page, what else is out there? Five different moments and five different pages, but it's the same buyer moving

3:48through each one of those, usually within a week or a few months. Reggie Paquette joined Service Titan when most of the site was a marketing brochure and the branded searches brought traffic while the leads came in through paid ads. The problem was that the organic bottom of funnel barely made a dent. Luckily he didn't pick one page type, he shipped a full-on portfolio. So he did nine different product tour pages, four industry pages and he linked

4:20them from the homepage. Also from blog posts. So in the end, he had like 13 interconnected BOFU pages within three quarters. Service Titan didn't just stop there. If you go to servicetitan.com slash tools, you see they have dozens of free calculators on all kinds of different things like HVAC load, duct sizing, labor rate, profit margin, and so on. And the glossary in their toolbox hub and the competitor comparisons is that every

4:51one of the five page type sits within one system and they link to each other so this is also how i build the bottom of funnel posts but also the glossary pages they're not strictly they're they're not part of the bofu pages but there's something that you need for authority because they're top of the funnel then you have the bottom of funnel pages like alternatives pages features pages and I usually recommend doing the block later as a middle of funnel kind of deal

5:23once you have customers as a SaaS and then you have data that you can use for middle of funnel content. The previously mentioned example isn't like a specific hack that some marketer came up with. There are a lot of other companies that do it. There's Lashay Lewis who also runs an agency and she delivered a really big pipeline with a 600% conversion rate lift for a SaaS client using the exact

5:54same flipped funnel playbook that I'm also advertising. Her keyword framework, which she calls Bofu Radar, maps directly onto four or five pages that I walked you through earlier. It's a different agency, different client roster, but they use the exact same pattern, and the reason is it just works. You just flip the funnel and start Bofu first instead of Tofu. So the conventional playbook is basically backwards. Everyone, for some reason, even in the SaaS world now and even with AI, starts the wrong way.

6:26Everyone goes all in on the blog they just research the same things rehash everything try to out beat the competitor but if you look at geekbot for geekbot for example they started with bottom of funnel content and thanks to grow and convert they tracked 64 articles over two years over two years and 22 of those generated 77 percent of conversions which is just 12 percent of the traffic of all blog posts. So the remaining 42 TOFU articles got 7 times more visitors and far fewer signups,

7:01which makes sense because they're just informational. The problem with most agencies is that they're going to sell you on Tofu because it's very easy to put you on a retainer and it looks safe. It's big. They can churn out a lot of these content pieces, but any content agency who invoices you on this doesn't tell you the full truth because they're not going to be able to prove results easily. Now, if you're saying we don't have the resources for five different types of

7:31pages, here's the thing. You don't need 50 000 pages of these you only need five you need one comparison page an alternatives page one good use case page and the glossary which obviously consists of multiple terms it depends what kind of sass you are in but let's say 20 to 30 and then you just need one tool a free calculator that people can just use you only spend an afternoon per page times five and within a week with AI, you're basically already done.

8:03If your other concern is that your blog already gets traffic, then I have to tell you that traffic is just a vanity metric. You will probably not be able to easily link it to any sort of conversion. If you look at Hansen's B2B SaaS client, it dropped from 50,000 visitors to 45,000, and they still quadrupled revenue in three months. And this math only works when you stop measuring the sessions and actually look into the deposits they're getting.

8:34Another thing that I often hear is comparison pages feel aggressive. The thing is, buyers are already comparing if you want them to or not. As I said in episode one, the search happens whether you're in it or not, and you have to control the narrative. And the last thing I often hear is, we don't have developer time for a free tool. That's fine, you can totally skip it, but again, AI makes it very easy to build this in an afternoon, but I still recommend that you build the other four pages.

9:06And then I would like you to really consider the free tool. It has to be something really related to your SaaS and really unique and really niche and narrowed down. So not just customer acquisition calculator, because there are billions of them already, you have to make it a bit more specific. We look for example, it's a good example, Signaturely built a free signature maker that earned them 3000 backlinks from 400 plus different sites, and this is like a compounding loop because they will just get more and more backlinks.

9:41Here's where I want you to start this week. Pick your number one competitor and build a really good comparison page and an alternatives page for them. These are just two pages that you can do in like an afternoon or two. Pick your strongest customer segment, the one your sales team closes really fast, and build a use case page for that segment. Build your glossary entry for the core term in your category and do a fan out search and find related terms to the core term. Make it the best answer on the internet that you can possibly write.

10:16Once you have these pages, link the comparison page with the alternatives, link the glossary to the use case page and link the use case page back for the comparison. Ideally you would build out the glossary in a way that you can link any related alternatives page comparison page and tool as a cta can be in the sidebar can be at the bottom but you have to build a really good internal link structure that's how you build the authority loop that a lot of good sas companies

10:46are building finally you don't need more blog posts i've been saying it a few times in this episode but you only need the really good pages that catch buyers at the moment, they're actually making a decision. Have the comparison page ready, build an alternatives page and a use case page, and then build your glossary and a tool. If you link them all together, you can measure the deposits that are coming in instead of the traffic. This is Before They Buy. I'm Deian, see you next week.