Which competitors should you compare yourself to? (It's not all of them.)

0:00My last episode was the wake-up call. Your competitor has a page and you don't, so you need to build one. But here's where people get stuck. They open G2, see 47 companies in their category, and they think they need a page for every single one. But they don't really, you need maybe 3 or 5. And picking the right 3 matters way more than covering all 47. I'm Deian, and this is Before They Buy. Most founders go one of two directions. Either they build nothing,

0:32which we've covered and why it is a problem, or they try to build everything. 20 comparison pages, all are thin, all look the same. They just swap out the name of the competitor and it's just generic. So obviously none of them really rank well. And even if they do, they don't convert. I've seen this over and over. A SaaS company lists every competitor they can find on G2. They make a page for each one, put a feature table on it, and then they are sitting there wondering why nobody wants to sign up.

1:03The page sits on page four of Google, doesn't pull any traffic, because nobody's searching for this specific versus keyword combination. So not every company in your category is someone your buyer is comparing you to. Some are in a different segment, some are too small, some are just so far ahead that a comparison page just highlights the gap. So the question in the end isn't who's in my category, but it's which comparisons can I actually win and is anyone searching for them?

1:35This is a two-part test and both of them matter. To apply this, there are four filters. Here's what I'd run every potential competitor through before building a page. The first filter is anyone searching for this. Go to Google, type your brand name, space, VS. see what autocomplete fills in and then try competitor name alternatives. So if your competitor is ClickUp, you just write ClickUp Alternatives. If nothing comes up, then a page won't bring you organic traffic.

2:07You could still use it in sales calls or give it to prospects if they are asking how you're different from this specific competitor. But for SEO and AI optimization, I would say just skip it. Build the pages people are actually searching for first. Now, don't just confuse the low volume with no volume at all. Because in the last episode I mentioned the Grow and Convert study. 95 articles generated 123,000 page views and almost 4,700 real conversions.

2:38They also tracked that six comparison articles that each had fewer than 20 searches per month. Those six articles drove 149 organic signups and some of them had a conversion rate at 4.5%. So you're now wondering, how is it even possible if the keyword volume was so low? When you're looking at SEO tools, or you have an API that grabs this data, then you have to understand that people don't search exactly the same way. They can use 10 different ways to find you.

3:09So it can be X versus Y, Y versus X, X or Y, is X better than Y, or X alternative. Now you have different variations, but the tool only sees one separately and doesn't group them. So the real volume is higher once you group all these different variations into one. If the volume is really low, build the page. If it's zero, don't prioritize it, but keep it in mind because zero volume keywords often are not really zero volume and they will still generate signups and traffic.

3:42Now the second filter is, does this name come up in real conversations? This one's quite simple, just ask your sales team, ask support, use AI to go through your tickets and contact form submissions, listen to your demo recordings or generate transcripts. And which competitor names do prospects actually say out loud from them? If nobody ever mentions a specific competitor, if it's just a name you saw on G2, then don't build a page for it. Because the comparison isn't really real if your buyers are not asking about it.

4:15Cloudways got this right. The guy who runs the digital marketing talked about this on Feature.com. They built over 40 comparison and alternative pages, but they didn't just pick random competitors. They started with the names that kept showing up in sales conversations, so there's actual demand behind it. For example, the page Cloudways versus WP Engine. This is a comparison that constantly came up in their deals, so they saw click-through rates go from 8% to 21%. The third filter is,

4:46can you tell an honest story? And this is one that people usually skip. If you lose to a specific competitor every time, because they just have more features, better pricing, they're just a bigger brand, then the comparison page won't help you at all. You just end up writing one of those pages where everything has a green check mark on your site and the reader knows it's completely not true. But here's the nuance. You don't need to be better across the board, you just need to be better for somebody specific. Penfriend CMO Tim Hansen shared a case study on Feature.com that nails it.

5:21They rebuilt a SaaS client's whole content strategy around bottom-of-funnel pages. They created 15 competitor comparison pages and organic traffic went from 14,000 to 82,000 a month. And the trial signups increased from 47 to 342. But the detail that stuck with me is that their single best-performing page was called why the product might not be right for you. This is very cool because the comparison is not against the competitor.

5:53It's a page that told certain buyers to go somewhere else. And it converted an astonishing 13.8% because when you're so honest about who you're not for, people trust you completely when you say who you are for. So you don't need to win every comparison. You need to pick the comparisons where you have real, specific, honest case. The ones where you can say, if you care about X, we are better. And this is why. The final filter to put your comparison pages through is, are the users unhappy?

6:28Keep an eye on competitor reviews on G2, Reddit, Twitter. You're looking for patterns, not one angry customer, but a trend. Let's say a price increase really pissed people off. A redesign was implemented, nobody asked for it and people just hate it. Or support times are tanking after a recent acquisition and now people are looking to bounce. When you see that, you should move fast. Build the alternatives pages for this competitor quickly, because they're already searching for it and you have a

7:01real high chance of popping up in the top. That search is someone who's already decided to leave. You're not convincing them that their tool is bad because they already know, they're already unhappy about something specific. So you just need to be there at the right time with a better option. If you're now thinking, okay, this sounds cool, but I think we're just too small for this. Well, one of the reasons you might think this is because in your mind you say you don't have competitors, but you do. Your buyer isn't just comparing you to another SaaS product.

7:35They're comparing you also to a spreadsheet because they're doing it in Google Sheets and it kind of works. They do nothing, so they just live with the problem until it becomes unbearable. Sometimes they just hire someone like an agency, full-time employee or VA, or they duct tape three turns together, Zapier, some Notion thing, and maybe a few spreadsheets. So those are your competitors. And the keyword versus spreadsheets or versus hiring an agency are pages worth building.

8:07And I don't have a case study to point this out, but it's kind of logic. You don't need data. You're not arguing that you're better than ToolX. You're arguing paying for software beats the way you're doing it now. So this is a different conversation to have. And for early stage products, it's often the most important one. The second thing I hear is that nobody searches our name. If your brand is really too new for brand versus competitor terms, and they don't show any volume, you can still piggyback off two competitors who do have volume.

8:43Grow & Convert did this with their client Circuit, which is a delivery route tool. Nobody searched for Circuit versus OnFleet. But people searched for Postmates versus OnFleet. So what they wrote was a three-way comparison, Postmates versus Onfleet versus Circuit. And they ranked number one with the smallest brand in the comparison. The important takeaway here is that you should not wait for brand awareness because you might wait a very long time.

9:14Just borrow somebody else's and piggyback on it. Your task for today is the following. Build the first page with your number one competitor. This is the name your sales team hears the most. And if you don't know, just ask them today. The second page should be the biggest competitor alternatives opportunity. Whichever competitor has the most search volume behind that phrase, especially if users are complaining, just go and build it right now. The third page is a category comparison. So it could be you versus spreadsheets

9:49versus hiring an agency, whichever one your buyers are actually weighing. If you've got energy for two more, then I would suggest you build a competitor with non-churn problems or a competitor versus competitor three-way comparison like I mentioned before. This is really good if you're still building your brand name. That's it, three pages, maybe two extra, don't build 20. What you can skip is every tiny startup that doesn't have any search volume and any competitors that are in weird categories that don't really overlap and

10:23you're just stretching it to have more comparison pages. Also, don't build the best CRM software around our keywords, because this is a different page for a different episode that I will go into later. So now you've got your list of who to compare against. The next question is, what actually goes on this page? Because most comparison pages are feature tables with check marks and axes. Nobody believes those, right? In the next episode, I will show you what the pages that actually convert look like.

10:55This is Before They Buy. I'm Deian. See you next week.