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The Factory Floor is hosted by the three co-founders of Conversion Factory, the marketing agency at the forefront of SaaS growth, marketing, and tech trends. Episodes are released on Twitter one day early, @coreyhainesco.
Every other week Corey, Zach, and Nick break down what’s working right now in SaaS marketing, share real-world lessons from the field, and give you the strategies you need to outpace the competition.
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Nick Loudon (00:00)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the factory floor. Today I am joined by guess who? Never seen them before. Zach Stevens and Corey Haines They're my compatriots on this podcast and in business and in life, because we're friends in real life. Today we're talking about something super important, which is comparison pages and competitive comparison pages. We build a lot of websites at Converter Factory. So we're constantly talking about different types of pages, what you should and shouldn't have. And so.
competitor comparison pages are a big talking point. And I wanted to talk about this because it feels right now in the world of AI that comparison pages are more important than ever. know, people ditching Google for the most part and using chat GPT and other AI tools to compare products and all that stuff. So is that the only reason that they're, you know, more important than ever? Why are competitor comparison pages?
more important than ever, Corey, Zach, whoever, what do you guys think?
Corey Haines (01:03)
Hmm.
Zstvns (01:04)
Well, from my perspective, what I see, particularly with the shift on AI is that your ability to control the narrative around that when people are shopping around, because that's a very high intent point in somebody's journey to becoming a customer if they're doing hard comparisons like that. And you can measure that against other ways and other things that we buy. If you are in the market for a car and I search
What is the difference between a Kia Carnival minivan and a Toyota Sienna? That means that I've decided on a minivan and I am looking to buy, I'm just not sure which one yet.
Nick Loudon (01:31)
you
Zstvns (01:43)
So in the case of software, if somebody's searching that, then you want to be the one who is able to influence their decision as ethically and honestly as you can and not let somebody else take that away from you or leave the AI to its own vices to make the opinion. So competitive comparison pages are a way for you to set up that battle in a way where you win. And we do this all the time with our clients of.
making the message feel and show why this choice, who it becomes the best option for and help them make that decision more effectively.
Nick Loudon (02:24)
Okay, right that makes sense
Corey Haines (02:24)
Yeah, I think it's funny that everyone's
talking about it now. We're kind of freaking out, trying to scramble to please the AI gods ⁓ instead of the Google gods like they were before. ⁓ Because I've been beating that this drum forever. You need competitor comparison pages. If you don't do it, your competitors will. Your customers are looking for this information. You could just be leaving it up to some random review site or blog posts by a disgruntled ex-customer.
Zstvns (02:35)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (02:54)
you want to be in control of the narrative because the reality too is that, you know, let's just say it was just in Google, not with an AI chat. There are going to be hundreds of search results for you versus a competitor. Um, and on the first page of Google, there's going to be around 10. So you're just going to be one of them. So you have to add in your own, like there's conversation happening. You just want to have like,
Zstvns (03:21)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (03:22)
get in a word, you wanna add your two cents to that conversation to make sure that you're representing yourself well and that you're providing the facts and you're really the only one who's gonna have your best interests in mind. And so to me, leaving it up to competitors and random bloggers on the internet or AI to figure out is like a very risky move. Like you really must need, need, need to have competitor comparison pages. ⁓
Nick Loudon (03:38)
you
Corey Haines (03:53)
The other way to think about this too, just from like the narrative perspective is that
especially for AI now that we're talking about it, AI needs structured content. And like, where does it get that content from? It's gonna try to pull it from the primary sources, which are gonna be you and your competitor. So imagine ⁓ you don't have like a, you don't have anything to add on why you're better than your competitor. AI is just going to talk about what your competitor is.
saying about you. So you have to be able to provide your side of the story.
Nick Loudon (04:31)
or
Yeah, it's like, and then are we going to like leave it up to chance or, you know, if there's two products or like these two are the competitors and one has the comparison pages and one doesn't, it's like, obviously we're going to read data, what information is out there and available. And we're going to go with the one that we can see.
Zstvns (04:53)
Totally. Yeah. And I think it creates an opportunity. You can definitely put the bias in your favor with those competitor comparison pages. cause we've seen this with things like, remember, ⁓ framer put on their website that web flows CMS required a manual setup as one of the comparison points that they highlighted. And in thinking about that, you're like, but don't
all of them require that? So somebody like in Webflow shoes, if they have a comparison page comparing themselves to Framework, they could say, yeah, but they have a manual setup as well. So it's a moot point. And the AIs are smart enough to reconcile those two objectives and it will point out and say, well, Framework says this, but then Webflow also says this. So it's a...
it doesn't really matter or it's clearly not a point of authority that framers making this claim or that web flows and i think it requires further investigation it might be a uh... having that might
allow them to traverse your site more thoroughly so that they can get a better picture of all that you have to say rather than just taking the LLM's word for it. But if the LLM right off the bat says, yeah, this product's way better because their competitor doesn't have a comparison page for me to take a look at and develop an opinion on.
Nick Loudon (06:25)
And I feel like there's, you know, there's other types of pages where you could even just like, I'm trying to think of like, okay, you got a feature page. Maybe you're just gathering information and you're not necessarily as a potential user that close to buying. In my mind, a competitor comparison page is like, well, you're about to pick one of these two or you're really weighing the options just before.
a buying decision. And so that makes them like extra more important. I did want to ask like, there's you know, there's plenty of markets that are like fairly saturated. And there's lot of tools, you know, how many is too many? Do you just pick your top 10? Do you pick your top five? Like what can you give people maybe like a playbook on like, if you don't have anything.
at least do this, you should at least have your top five competitors, comparison pages for those. If not, like an index page that has like, know, snapshots of everything and all your competitors, like kind of give, I guess, a best practice maybe. I think that would be really helpful to like kind of get in ⁓ any listener's mind that might be considering doing this.
Corey Haines (07:29)
I, in my point of view, I think that the lowest hanging fruit and the absolutely bare minimum thing you should do is to not even have competitor comparison pages, but have competitor alternative pages, because there's usually always someone searching for your competitor and then alternative or alternative to whatever your competitors brand name is. And that's really low hanging fruit because now you don't even need to
do a comparison, you don't need to bash them. All you have to do is talk about yourself and why you're a good alternative to that competitor. There's a couple of different formats here. We can have alternative to a competitor. We can have alternatives to your competitor. We can have you versus your competitor and then even competitor versus competitor pages. ⁓ so there's kind of those like the four big buckets.
different formats that we see from these. think that you versus competitor is also a really solid format. ⁓ but they like strictly individual, single alternative pages are really, really easy starting point because that allows you to talk about your narrative and positioning in a really natural organic way. It can talk about why people in generally are kind of disgruntled with that alternative and then position yourself as a
easy to use alternative with a special little offer or guarantee or easy way to get started. Maybe even migrations, right? So very, very low hanging fruit to answer your question about the quantity, do them all. Why not? I mean, you can have ⁓ your alternative alternative pages or comparison pages at least against your top competitor or your most popular biggest competitor.
but there's absolutely no downside to having those pages for every one of your competitors.
Zstvns (09:32)
Especially if you're doing it in a very structured, organized format that doesn't vary a whole lot between the pages. I think that makes it a little bit more palatable and easy to digest as far as, how should I go about doing this? You're following a template, essentially.
Nick Loudon (09:48)
Yeah.
becomes very
systematized.
Zstvns (09:52)
Yeah, I think I want to piggyback off of what Corey said a little bit. think one of the bigger opportunities that allows you to get really, really in depth about some of your features and how they stack up to some of the issues that people are currently facing. what was the, Corey, when you were doing this for Savvy Cal, one of the main things was the calendar overlay, right? Like on Calendly, you can't see ⁓ your calendar unless you have it open on a separate,
plane and then you have to like, you know, look back at work between screens. But with Savvy Cal, I was like, no, no, it's all right here, one place. So that's a very specific feature that they were able to compare a giant to a giant competitor in a very specific context of like, this is how we are better against this competitor for this particular feature that they may have, or they might not have at all.
Corey Haines (10:49)
Yeah, I think it's, it all goes back to the positioning and jobs to be done switch analysis as well. When we're getting all those facts on paper in the beginning, we're like, okay, why do people choose you over your competitors? Hey, when they're switching over, what are the common reasons like why they're attracted to you or why they're leaving your competitors? Cool. Those should be the first things that we mentioned on those pages because
those are the facts, that's gonna resonate so strongly when someone is searching for a Calendly alternative or a SaviCal versus Calendly. And then they go to the page and one of the first things they see is the exact thing that they're frustrated by and the solution that they're excited by. Easy pickings, right? That's the reason why these pages usually have some of the highest conversion rates of any of the pages on the website because they're so high intent and because...
you have so many good opportunities to sell them on switching over to you.
Zstvns (11:48)
Yeah, it puts the solution in the context of a problem, think, a lot more effectively.
Nick Loudon (11:53)
Yeah.
⁓ Can you maybe give some guidance on like not bashing but like when is you know, what's too much and like it does it all like fit within the like, well, this is you kind of your messaging and your brand voice, you know, you don't want to go against that but like, you know, there's been times when people have been positioned super hard against their competitors almost in a very vocal and outspoken way that's really paid off quite largely for them. So I guess like if I'm if I'm about to build one,
like how bad can I talk about the people that I want to absorb their customers? That's what I really want to do.
Corey Haines (12:32)
Yeah, well customers are going to see through that, right? So I don't think there's any pressure to even bash your competitors to try to make a bigger deal out of things than they really are. ⁓ people really see through that and they're kind of sensitive to that. So in my experience, the best way to go about it is to be objective, to be honest about ways that they're better than you in certain areas, or just to even in general talk about your own shortcomings or even just areas where you're kind of even.
Maybe you're not better, but you're like, it's just, you know, feature parity here. And we both checked the boxes in this area, but, ⁓ the main thing is specifically calling out common reasons why people are frustrated with one of your competitors. And you can even loop back to kind of what we call a voice, a customer, exact phrases people use in online reviews or testimonials or, ⁓
even when they're switching over to you and you ask them, why did you switch from this competitor? Right? You can use and kind of clip those sayings and say, Hey, these are the common reasons why people switch. We're not saying that they're bad. We're not saying they're horrible products. So on and so forth. ⁓ when it comes to things like customer support and pricing, you can be a little bit more cutthroat and a little bit more blunt in your delivery about, Hey, these competitors have known to be a little bit
opaque or even aggressive in their pricing, or they're going to want to lock you into an 18 month contract, or they're going to want to X, Y, and Z or a lot of customers say they complain about the level of customer support and the response times, for example. So there are things like that that you can just mention that might not be like low blows, but you're just kind of being honest.
Nick Loudon (14:14)
you
Yeah, it seems like it all comes back to kind of the original point, which is controlling the narrative, which is, you know, you might have a competitor that, you know, if you really apples to apples, look at it, you're like, they beat us in a lot of things, but we're cheaper. So what needs to be mentioned first is like save X amount of dollars switching from X product. It's like that narrative, the main focus of the page is like, Hey, we are an alternative to them.
Corey Haines (14:38)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (14:45)
and we will save you money by switching to us. And so that is the narrative that we're pushing. And if you're willing to talk about the negative things fairly openly of your competitors, you probably need to be fully willing to talk about the positives. Like I feel like that is an area where you could get a lot of respect even from a visitor is like, ⁓ here's all the stuff they do bad, but to be fair.
their top notch here, like they beat everybody in this area. You know, like I think that is something that is perfectly fine to do.
Corey Haines (15:14)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Zstvns (15:18)
I what it's called, but there is a psychological ⁓ analysis or psychological term for that where if you address the shortcomings in addition to a lot of the features, just makes it far more realistic. It's like if you go and buy a motorhome and they say, yeah, yeah, it's really, really cool. It's got all these neat features. It's expensive though. And then people are like, ⁓ yeah, it makes sense. It's expensive. Yeah.
Nick Loudon (15:41)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (15:43)
Yeah, they're being honest. Yeah, the main
thing you want to avoid is just having a table that has a bunch of green check marks for all the things you're awesome at and then a bunch of red Xs for all the things that your competitors are not awesome at in a way that's oversimplified and just feels like everything is a twisted narrative that makes it look favorable to you even though it's obviously missing a lot of the story.
Nick Loudon (15:55)
Yeah.
Zstvns (15:56)
Yeah.
Nick Loudon (16:07)
context.
Zstvns (16:10)
There is some design.
Corey Haines (16:10)
That's where people get frustrated.
Zstvns (16:14)
Voodoo you can do there though on those particularly on those tables and with the side-by-side comparisons like for example you can Like what we will do is we'll try and keep all the check marks for a client in branded colors or a farmer bold and Consistent so it's like this is a green check mark. That's in a circle for everything on our client, but then on the competition You might have X's ⁓ But I try not to we try not to make those red
Nick Loudon (16:17)
you
Zstvns (16:44)
so much as just like plain, you like you almost want to make them the checks and the X's feel similar so that it's hard to even gauge what they do and do not have, but you're still being very transparent and objective. What you're doing is you're visually making it feel less appealing or...
Nick Loudon (17:01)
you
Zstvns (17:07)
to compare to yours like, well, this has green checks all the way through and this one is, you know, a little bit more difficult to read.
Corey Haines (17:11)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (17:13)
Yeah.
Well, okay. It sounds like the key takeaway here is if somebody's going to do it, it should be you. Like if someone's going to write a comparison page and your product's involved, you should be the one writing it if possible. LLMs love that stuff. They're going to eat it up. And these are high intent pages. Like don't skip over doing these to work on something that isn't going to move the needle and bring in revenue. These are, these are pages that can bring in revenue. Am I summarizing well?
Corey Haines (17:43)
Yeah. Yeah. One other, like kind of a parting thought that's more high level is if you have good positioning and if we've done the hard work to figure that out, writing these pages is a piece of cake and it even really helps to not bash competitors when you, when your positioning is so specific and you can say, Hey, for these use cases, we don't really focus on this. We're not great at it. Our competitor is though.
Zstvns (17:44)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (18:11)
So like if that's important to you, go with them because we don't care about those use cases or for these, yeah, for these segments, for these types of customers, for these budgets, we're not for you. Go with them, right? Go with the competitor. Sure. You want to spend a million dollars and you care about X, Y, and Z use cases? Have at it. If you care about A, B, and C in your budget is this area, go with us, right?
Nick Loudon (18:15)
We don't care about you. ⁓
Zstvns (18:20)
you
Corey Haines (18:38)
Having good positioning really simplifies this so that don't have to twist the narrative. You don't have to bash your competitors. You don't have to try to get super, super fancy with your word choice and your design stuff. And it can be straightforward and factual if you've done the hard work of positioning.
Nick Loudon (18:57)
And if you need help with positioning go to conversionfactory.co. No, I'm just kidding Well, I'm not kidding but Yeah Okay, hey well I appreciate your guys thoughts ⁓ Super interesting write some competitor comparison pages everybody They're super valuable and we will see you on the next episode of the factory floor peace out
Zstvns (19:03)
conversionfactory.gov sorry
Corey Haines (19:08)
Yeah,
kidding, not kidding.
Peace.