A buyer who is nearly ready to choose will open a new tab and type your competitor's name followed by "alternatives."
Someone is answering that search today. Usually it's G2, sometimes it's the competitor themselves, and either way you're letting somebody else shape the shortlist.
You can take that search back. If your SaaS is still early and nobody knows your name yet, though, the standard playbook will point you at the wrong page first.
Build the Pages That Carry Their Name
The usual advice is to create "[Your product] vs [Competitor]" pages for every company you want to beat, which works well once buyers are searching for your brand. Early on they aren't, so the search term contains a brand with almost no demand behind it, and you can publish ten of those pages and watch all ten sit at zero clicks.
"[Competitor] alternatives" works differently. The competitor already has the awareness, people are already searching for them, and a good share of those searchers want a way out: unhappy with the product, outgrowing it, or checking what else exists before renewal. You don't have to create that demand. You can borrow it.
Vs pages are worth building later, once your own name gets typed into Google. To know when, open Search Console, filter your queries by your brand name, and look at the last three months. Under about fifty a month and you're still early.
Comparison and alternative pages are two of the four page types that do most of the converting on a B2B SaaS site, and there's a section covering all four in an early-stage SaaS SEO guide.
The One Thing to Take Away
Build around search demand that already exists. Your competitor's name has it and yours doesn't yet, so their name goes in the page title first.
Pick Three to Five Competitors, and Be Strict
A competitor earns a page when all three of these are true.
- Your buyers mention them. If prospects never bring the company up, the page attracts the wrong audience. Search volume on its own isn't enough.
- People search for alternatives to them. Check "[Competitor] alternatives" and its variants in your keyword tool. The mid-market competitor your buyers actually consider is the sweet spot, since the category giant has volume plus twenty established pages already fighting over it.
- You have a reason to win. Finish this sentence: "People leave them for us because ___." You don't have to be better at everything. You do need one clear reason a person already paying them would move.
Three to five pages is about a fortnight of work, and enough to tell you whether twenty is worth doing.
Stuck on the "because" sentence?
The positioning framework walks through finding the one reason a buyer switches, before you write a page that depends on it. Free, and the page tells you what is inside before you hand over an email.
Get the positioning framework →Write the Part Where You Lose
This is the section most comparison pages avoid, which is the reason yours should have it.
Your reader is comparing two products because they've seen enough marketing to know every company claims to be faster, easier and cheaper. A page that wins on every row is predictable, and predictable pages get closed. So tell them plainly who should stay with the competitor:
If you've got a support team of thirty and need custom routing across five regions, they built for that and we didn't. If you're under ten people and want this live by Friday, we're the faster answer.
That does more than make the page honest. It helps the right buyer self-select, it makes every other claim on the page believable, and it hands the reader language they can use when they explain the switch internally.
Keep the details current too, because pricing changes and features move. Put a "last checked" date on the page and link to the competitor's own pricing so readers can verify you.
Build the Page Around the Decision
Your reader is trying to answer one question: should I move from this product to yours? Everything on the page either helps with that or gets cut.
Put the search term in your H1 so they know at a glance they're in the right place, then answer the comparison in the first paragraph. Nobody should scroll a thousand words to find your position.
After that:
- The honest split, covering who should choose you and who should stay
- A comparison table of six to ten things buyers genuinely weigh
- Your pricing and theirs, with the date you checked
- What switching involves: setup time, what happens to their existing data, and anything they'll lose or have to rebuild
That last one is the piece nearly everybody leaves out, and fear of the migration is what kills most of these deals.
If you have a customer who made this exact move, use their story. A real person explaining why they left will do more than another paragraph of product claims.
Then give one clear next step, the same call to action at the top and the bottom. Getting that part right across a whole set of pages is most of what landing page and CRO work involves.
One Rule About Schema
Don't put AggregateRating on your own product on your own site.
FAQPage markup is worth having if there's a real FAQ block on the page. Past that,
comparison pages win on content and links.
Internal Links Are What Get These Pages Indexed
A comparison page nobody can find is still useless, and on a young domain a new page with nothing pointing at it can wait months to get indexed. This is the most common reason a batch of these produces nothing at all.
Link to each page from your relevant product pages, your pricing page, and any blog post covering the problem that competitor solves. Once you have several, put them on a comparison hub and link that from your footer. Add the URLs to your sitemap the day they go live.
Measure the Right Things
Five new pages won't produce a traffic trend you can read, so judging them on sessions will make you kill them early. Watch three things.
- Is it indexed? Check Search Console first, because an unindexed page is a linking problem and rewriting it won't help.
- Is it moving for the target search? A page going from nowhere to page three inside six weeks is the signal you want, and it shows up well before the traffic does.
- Are visitors taking the next step? Tag the call to action so you can see it. Five sessions and two clicks is a page doing its job at your size.
A small amount of highly relevant traffic will teach you more than a lot of generic traffic. Give each page a full quarter before you decide. The same rule covers everything else you publish, which we get into in where your traffic stops turning into signups.
When to Wait
Sometimes the answer is to hold off.
If buyers aren't mentioning any competitors, talk to five customers before you write five pages. What they tell you about who they nearly bought instead is worth more than anything you'd have published.
If you can't finish "people leave them for us because ___," that's a positioning problem, and a comparison page will put it on your website where buyers can read it. Our SaaS positioning framework walks through fixing that first.
And if your only obvious competitor is a category giant with enormous brand demand and a library of comparison pages already ranking, find the mid-market competitor your buyers actually consider and start there.
Getting the Order Right
The order is the thing most early teams get wrong. Build around search demand that already exists, get honest in the section that costs you something, and give the pages enough internal links to be found. Done that way, they're about as close to free pipeline as SaaS SEO gets. Later, when people start typing your name, the vs pages become worth building too.
Want to know which competitor pages are worth building for your product? That's one of the things we look at in the free SaaS SEO audit. By hand, in 48 hours, and there's no pitch attached to it.
Common Questions
Should I Build Vs Pages or Alternative Pages First?
Alternative pages, in almost every early-stage case. A vs page ranks on searches containing your brand name, and if nobody is searching for you yet the page has no demand behind it. An alternative page ranks on searches containing the competitor's name, and that demand already exists.
How Many Comparison Pages Should I Start With?
Three to five. That is about a fortnight of work, and it gives you enough indexed pages to judge whether the format works for your category before you commit to twenty.
Can I Name a Competitor on My Own Website?
Comparing products by name is standard practice in SaaS, and you will find it on most established sites in your category. Keep every factual claim accurate and dated, avoid using their logo or branding in ways that suggest an endorsement, and get a lawyer to look at anything you are unsure about. We are a marketing studio, so this is not legal advice.
What If the Competitor Is Much Bigger Than Us?
That is the normal case, and it is why the honest section matters. A page from a smaller company that admits where the bigger product wins is more credible than one claiming to beat them everywhere. If the competitor is a category giant with a dozen comparison pages already ranking, start with the mid-market competitor your buyers actually consider.
How Long Before a Comparison Page Ranks?
Movement on low-competition competitor terms usually shows at 60 to 90 days, and traffic follows later. Give each page a full quarter before you decide anything about it.
Where Should These Pages Live on the Site?
In your main site structure, alongside your product pages. Burying them in the blog costs them the internal links they need. They are commercial pages, they need links from your product and pricing pages, and a comparison hub that lists them all gives you somewhere to link from the footer.
Kehinde Akindele
I run Derive DE, a B2B SaaS marketing studio in Lagos working with early-stage SaaS teams across the US, UK, and Africa. I plan the work and I do the work.
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