Comparison pages - worth it? (e.g. us vs our competitor)

C

clmorgan

New member
Has anybody here designed any comparison pages? e.g. Transistor.fm's one, which I linked the other day in another comment

If yes
  • Did they work?
  • How do you quantify if they work? Just traffic?
  • Is it worth spending time on making pages such as these for competitors smaller than you? Or only on the ones with more traffic?
  • Any downside to it?
 
@clmorgan As a customer, yes it makes a difference to me. Now I definitely understand that the companies would highlight their best features compared to what their competitors do which makes a couple of people hate these comparisons. I just hate it when it’s being exaggerated or providing lies.

If there’s a downside it would be to routinely update it as your competitors add and update, although I suspect you already have your competitors on a watchlist and you’re aware of the changes.

Sorry OP for not answering exactly to your question, but I hope this small nugget helps.
 
@clmorgan We've done a comparison checklist, so when prospects do demos with other companies, they have a guide for what to look for and ask about. It's not as "in your face" as A vs. B. This saas is an enterprise b2b that starts around $40k and goes up to $150k. It's a white glove and reserved BD pitch where the sales cycle can last 9+ months. For saas that are more turn and burn, low cost, with a short sales cycle, then for sure, have at it.
 
@clmorgan We were initially hesitant to create these pages but I can agree with a lot of others here, they are one of the best sources of acquisition we have.

We took a slightly different approach, rather than a GoSquared vs Intercom page, we created a broader comparison page with a few other alternatives included also:https://www.gosquared.com/blog/intercom-alternatives-free

We literally did nothing with this post expect publish it, no promotion at all and it now ranks at now 1 or 2 organically for 'Intercom Alternatives' search queries.

It drives traffic and the sign ups we get from it are really good quality.

From our perspective, it probably doesn't make too much sense to make a page for smaller competitors, especially for this kind of post, as the search volume would be quite low.

I actually don't think there is any downside to these pages when you look it at from a work vs reward perspective.I hope that helps.
 
@clmorgan Comparision and alternative blogpost or pages on your website are your money pages. They are a "Must have" component in your roadmap of marketing.

These pages drive traffic in which the visitor intent is either to choose a service like yours [ In comparison case ] or they are looking for something better than your competitors [ In alternative case ]

Also, talking about the example that you gave, you are going to write a number of content that would be list based [ Google prefers ranking list based content since it loves giving its users to make choices instead of forcing a monopoly ]. In that case, you can't give a backlink to your competitor. So, for that, you can do internal linking to your competitor's comparison page that you have published on your website. This makes you good in eyes of the algoritham as you give choice, plus, drive traffic to your money page [ Comparision or alternative ] where users can convert as customers.

In short, you are completing your user journey to choose a service like yours.

Dude, focus on high volume alternative/comparision keywords. Why would you invest time in creating content that has no reader or decision-maker? Just make sure you are a very close alternative to them.
 
@clmorgan It's definitely worth your time.

Only make comparisons with those products who have more users onboarded because many times people search for " alternatives" for example we use "the best alternative to asana" and so on.

And also while making comparison i think you should make sure that comparison shouldn't look biased towards your product. You can list out some unique features that you have at the top and then list out some common features with the competition.

Moreover comparisons also comes in handy when user is already using your competitors product so you can just share the link to the comparison.
 
@clmorgan I think they're totally worth it, for customers first to have many points of comparison and for the business at it gives you more page for SEO purposes. Just type a saas name into Google and a "vs" will pop up.
 
@clmorgan For SEO it's great. Take Plausible analytics for example. They have a matamo comparison page which ranks highly if you search for matamo analytics. I like this strategy alot.
 
@clmorgan Hey /@clmorgan, thanks for linking this in the other thread

It seems to me there are three main reasons to create comparison pages:
  1. To steal some traffic from your competitors/generate more traffic
  2. To not let your competitors control the narrative on comparisons (because they will mostly create their own one-sided comparison)
  3. To tap into an audience with high-buying intent (because someone comparing solutions is close to buying)
I can also say that they do work. I have worked with several SaaS companies that were generating leads from their comparison pages.
 
@clmorgan definitely worth it, from what I've heard from marketing folks who have scaled startups from pre seed to series B. Even at an early stage. Would suggest first to see how many searches are made for terms like: "alternative to {competitor}" or "{competitor 1} vs {competitor 2} comparison" etc. That will help you prioritize what kind of pages to create with what keywords.

Chances are that early on what will rank highest in google are blog posts that list a bunch of alternatives to a market leader (for example, search "zapier alternatives"). Might make a lot of sense to also reach out to these blog owners and suggest adding your startup to their list. That way you can get traffic while your domain does not have such a high authority + worthy backlinks to rank higher over time.
 
@clmorgan A lot and a lot of SaaS comapnies have done this successfully and publically acknowledged the business won as a direct consequence. Freshworks, Sendgrid are two companies that come to my mind.

Whether it is going to work for you would depend on a bunch of factors:
  1. Competition in the market (the more competetive/fragmented the better generally)
  2. Is searching for competitors a part of the user journey
  3. How big is your competitor (the bigger the better)
  4. Competition in the market (the more competitive/fragmented the better generally)
As for legal ramifications, the laws would be different by countries/regions but remember that as long as you are being factual, it should be good imho

Downsides: just when you get it wrong by doing posts for the competitor not worth doing posts for.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

K
Using Landing Pages to Validate Ideas
Replies
8
Views
9
kmfendley
K
S
How Landing Pages Evolve At A Fast Growing Startup
Replies
1
Views
10
rachamana
R
B
e-commerce AMP pages
Replies
0
Views
11
bigpicture4
B
A
I noticed four important elements in landing pages that attract customers
Replies
1
Views
9
coltproulx
C
M
I made a super easy way to create free FAQ pages for your indie business!
Replies
1
Views
11
satan1568
S
S
I'm building a gallery of free HTML/CSS landing pages for your next side project
Replies
18
Views
44
savedmayo
S
T
I’ve built 20%+ conversion rate landing pages. I’ll review yours for free
2 3
Replies
49
Views
93
heirbornmusic
H
P
The best landing pages have these 3 elements for conversion
Replies
0
Views
12
pinkjellybeans32
P
J
I trained an AI to be a technical analysis guru on 3500 pages of trading commentary
Replies
4
Views
23
moonlightlaura
M
N
SaaS Product Pages: How to Reverse-Engineer your competitors' SEO strategy and steal their traffic [Templates Included]
Replies
5
Views
27
muiris
M
Back
Top