Why "for marketing agencies" outranks your features page

0:00Open Google Search Console for your product and look at your Features page. Now search for your product name for marketing agencies. So let's say, ClickUp for marketing agencies, or for e-commerce, or for sales teams. Your Features page doesn't rank for any of those. Somebody else's page does. I'll show you the pages beating your Features page and the numbers behind why they actually work. I'm Deian and this is Before They Buy. Here's a problem I see with SaaS companies all the time.

0:34Your features pages try to speak to everyone at the same time. It lists what your product does. So let's say file management, reporting, integrations, team collaboration. It's great for someone who already knows your name. But if the person is searching project management for marketing agencies, they don't know you yet. They're looking for a tool that fits this specific situation. Your features page doesn't mention marketing agencies, it doesn't mention their

1:04problems, and it doesn't show up. Atlassian has a page called Jira for Agile Project Management. Another one is for Requirements Management and another one for Incident Management. Each one opens with the pain points of that specific segment, then highlights the features that segment cares about. And it also includes social proof from people in that specific segment. You can see it's very targeted. They don't have a general page with general quotes and general social proof. So everything goes back to who's this person? It's a manager.

1:39Then we need quotes from managers, not from freelancers. If Google sees a page titled Jira for Agile Project Management and a page titled Features, when someone searches Agile Project Management tool, which one do you think gets served? There's a small company that figured this out and went from 67 signups a month to over 2,100. I'll get into that. Let's talk about Dynamic Mockups, which is an AI image generator with a very small team. They had a features page and a blog. 67 signups a month.

2:13Not great. But then they built use case pages. AI image generator for e-commerce, for designers, for marketers. Each page targeted a specific buyer persona with real search volume. E-commerce page alone had 7000 monthly searches. In 10 months, their signups increased from the previously mentioned 67 to 2100. Conversion rate also doubled from 10.4 to 25%. And then they started outranking

2:45Canva on specific queries despite being a fraction of the size. The project was run by an agency called Omnius, who published a full case study. And one thing they said is that your features pages can't do this. It speaks to everyone and ranks for no one. Calendly did something similar at a very large scale. They had over 6,000 indexed pages with integration pages like Calendly for Zoom and use case pages like scheduling for sales teams.

3:16While each page got only modest traffic, the Salesforce integration page pulls in about 500 visits a month alone. If you multiply this now by 6,000, Calendly has over a million organic visitors. So obviously a single page is not a traffic monster, but the power behind it is having thousands of them that are very targeted and as a group structure create organic visitors. Let's look at a few really big companies and how they're doing it.

3:49If we look at the money transfer service WISE, they take it even further than anyone else I've seen. They have roughly 12,000 landing pages, most of them about Swift codes for US visitors alone. Thousands more for currency converters and all kinds of routing numbers. They even build a custom CMS called Lienzo just to generate these pages. With built-in SEO for meta tags, structured data, helping them with internal linking and so on. But the reward was that the organic traffic graph mirrors their indexed page count.

4:23So the more pages they started creating, the more traffic. It's almost a straight line going up. The person who runs Organic Growth at Wise, Fabrizio Ballarini, said, The more content you feed to Googlebot, the more it gets addicted to crawling, indexing, and serving your site. His favorite KPI on Early Stage Project is actually looking at how many indexed pages per month they have. For WISE, it did pay off indeed because they have over 6 million organic visits a month.

4:53And this is not from blog posts because we're still not talking about blog posts here. Everything is bottom of the funnel. This is from templated pages, each solving specific problems for one specific search. Right now, WISE has over 12,000 pages and you have 12, right? Because you're a very small company, which is totally fine. But dynamic mock-ups prove that the same principle applies to a small team. The question isn't really how many pages you need, but whether you have any at all right now.

5:23Zach Mao, head of marketing at Averi, put it this way. Your competitor ranks for a million keywords. You may be ranked for 200. They're not really outworking you. They're outsmarting you with programmatic SEO. Think about that for a minute, because the gap between 200 keywords and a million isn't just the content volume, but the number of pages that match a specific search. Now, to put this into practice, every company that makes this work follows the same pattern. There's a template and not a blank page that they use. For example,

5:57Calendly uses the same layout for every integrations page. It has a title, an overview, there's a video, some features and a CTA. Wise uses the same structure for every Swift code page. And Dynamic Mockups use the same frame for every use case. one template they populate with segment-specific data, Then there's also the hub and spoke linking. So category pages like for marketers or for e-commerce link down to specific child pages.

6:28And the child pages they link back. So this concentrates the authority and helps Google index a bit faster. The second thing that you have to keep in mind that I also talked about in other episodes is to have the correct proof on the page. So we don't use generic testimonials. If the page says for marketing agencies, then you need to have a testimonial for a marketing agency owner or some ops person. Atlassian does this on every JIRA use case page. It's segment-specific problems

6:59with segment-specific social proof. While your features page answers what does this product do in general. A use case page answers does this specific tool work for someone like me. It's a very different question with a different intent behind it, so it requires a different page and a different setup. As a founder, you might say, well, but I don't need thousands of pages. And the truth is, you don't, because Zapier might have 50,000 and wise, 12,000.

7:30Those are very mature companies that scaled over years and they have very large teams behind them. But as I mentioned, Dynamic Mockups started with a handful of use case pages and hit 2,000 signups a month. while Calendly's individual pages each get a few hundred visits. So the secret sauce here is not really volume on day one. You just have to build a template so that each page that you build afterwards takes a few hours and not a week. The other pushback I hear is, won't these pages be thin content?

8:01Well, only if you make it thin, open with the segment's pain point, show what kind of features they care about, include a case study from the industry and answer specific objections. That's not really thin. If you think about it, that's more relevant than your features pages will ever be for that specific search. Next, I want you to list your three best customer segments. Not the biggest markets, the ones where you win most often. The ones where your sales team is just really good at closing deals. For each search, for example, your category for that segment, check what shows up.

8:36If nobody owns that search, you just found a page you should start building. Then begin with building one template. It should have a title, a segment-specific pain point, three features that segment cares about, one testimonial from a customer in that segment, and finally a CTA. Then clone it for your next two segments. By now you have three very targeted pages and you don't need 12,000. You just need those three that match what your buyer is searching. Your feature pages just talk about your product but these pages talk about your

9:10buyer's problem and that's why they're going to rank and outperform features pages. This is Before They Buy. I'm Deian. See you next week.