Pioneers of Comparative Content Marketing

Sounds interesting? Exciting? Slightly confusing?

Read my story below… It’s only 3:47 minutes, and I promise you’ll fundamentally change how you think about SaaS content marketing. Good deal?

In late 2019, just after graduating from Physics and quitting my college job as a software engineer, I wanted to make a career change. After a few tumultuous months, I got a job as the sole content marketing manager in a SaaS that was recently acquired by the SaaS legend Sujan Patel.

That SaaS had the best product in the industry. It was a really cool piece of software.

At the moment of acquisition, it already had a bit over 200 articles living on the blog — which covered nearly every top and middle-of-the-funnel topic in this rather small industry. (Think how-to stuff, glossary posts, why X, the benefits of Y, and so on…)

The problem?

Even though these articles got 10,000s of visitors, they only delivered 19 free trial signups every month.

That wasn’t enough to achieve the growth we wanted. Sujan told me to find more content opportunities that will deliver real growth…

I pondered for a week.

I researched the keywords, analyzed our competitors.

It was strange because our competitors didn’t have a well-developed blog. Not even close to the traffic that we had. Yet they were getting all the sales. What gives?

And then I found them. The articles that were getting only a handful of clicks every month. Articles that didn’t surface on the top when analyzing the competitor with SEO tools. Most of their keywords had search volume so small they got filtered out in typical keyword analysis….

Still, those were the only pages that we didn’t have.

These pages were comparing our solution to their own solution, and the competitor of course claimed they’re better for one reason or another. It was all crudely put together, but in my naive mind of a Physicist—yet unspoiled with any “common marketing knowledge”—I saw the coolest thing ever…

We were educating the market, and our competitors were selling to the market.

(Sujan didn’t think it was that cool, though.)

We did all the hard work of teaching the market why they needed a solution like ours, and our competitors then showed them their offer.

We did all the hard work of pushing people down the funnel, and our competitors then just positioned themselves as having the best product.

Props to them.

The articles our competitors wrote completely botched our positioning. (No wonder, they weren’t incentivized to get it right.) And since there were 10+ articles doing this everywhere our prospects looked, no wonder ours wasn’t the best selling product.

My first initiative was to reclaim our positioning — to take control over the false narrative around our product on the market. 

I reoptimized the existing traffic with surveys and popups that called out the part of visitors that were “active buyers”… I wrote my first comparison content… I made partnerships with, surprisingly, our competitors… and our signups started to increase very, very fast.

We went after keywords that had 10-100 search volume on Ahrefs. The type of keywords that, 99% of the time, would get ignored in a typical content marketing campaign. We didn’t care. Even if we reclaimed a single user it was worth the effort. That was still thousands of dollars in lifetime value.

Everything we did revolved around talking to people who were in “active buying mode”.

It wasn’t long before the articles I wrote became the best converting pages on our site (highlighted):

And soon our metrics improved big time:

Sujan was pretty happy with what we did:

After our success, I began to notice that SaaS companies in other competitive industries are also approaching content marketing the wrong way.

Newer companies were copying the industry veterans — they were creating educational content because that’s the content the industry veterans used to grow all those years ago. “Surely if we do everything they did back then we’ll get to where they are right now. Right?”

*Diagram: less competitive industry, more competitive industry (effectiveness of educational content)*

When I noticed this confusion, I decided to help them.

I made an agency that solves three main problems that SaaS companies face nowadays:

1. Generate actual leads & sales from the blog on autopilot
2. Create content that ranks high & holds those ranks for years to come
3. Design a rigorous content creation process that requires minimum input & editing from the client

Despite my initial win, solving these problems wasn’t easy.

I spent the next 1095 days analyzing Google results for keywords such as “SaaS A vs SaaS B”… I noted every little detail that correlated with higher rankings and used it in my next article… I noted every little detail that correlated with lower rankings and I left it out in my next article…

I’ve done this so many times I lost count, and the framework for writing world-class Comparison Content emerged naturally.

The entire writing process became more and more detailed; I began to notice nuances regarding company positioning, UI/UX development, price analysis, feature comparison, product copywriting, and more.

With this, the content creation process increased from 10 hours… to 20 hours. And then to 30 hours, 40 hours, and all the way up to 50 hours of manpower per piece.

It became too much for one person to handle, so I started hiring & training a team.

But our results paid off.

We routinely began taking top positions for the most lucrative comparative keywords for our clients.

Here’s us ranking a featured snippet for “Calendly vs Google Calendar” for our client YouCanBookMe in the Scheduling Software industry:

Here’s us taking a featured snippet for “AdSense vs Ezoic” for our client Snigel in the Website Ad Monetization Industry.

Here’s us going from position #12 to #3 in 6 weeks after publishing “Hotjar vs FullStory” for our client SessionStack in the Session Replay Industry. Being beaten only by G2 and Hotjar.

And then we took some more snippets. Here’s “Mouseflow vs Crazyegg” for the same client.

Here’s us ranking #1 for “best photo booth apps” for our client Simple Booth, a mobile SaaS.

Here’s us taking a snippet for “Mural vs Miro” for our client Ayoa in the Visual Collaboration Platform Industry:

And here’s my DR 20 site ranking #1 for “Skool vs Kajabi” for my affiliate marketing project.

And here are all the other Comparative Keywords I’m owning with the same small affiliate site of mine:

All of this was achieved with ZERO link building — only high-quality comparison content.

The ROI followed too.

One of our best comparative articles is currently adding $5560 LTV worth of SaaS users EVERY month.

We gathered enough data to let our clients know they can expect a minimum of 2-3 trial signups every 100 SEO clicks from our content. In most industries, that percentage is even higher:

We also noticed that, as long as the software is decent, you can expect to get 1 paying user every 300 – 350 clicks.

For example, in the selected timeframe, the client in the image above got:

4 sales / 1,239 clicks

 Or 👇

1 sale / 310 clicks

Same with my small affiliate project. I reliably get 1 sale / 328 clicks.

Knowing this, we calculated that each SEO click to our content brings our client with regular mid-market prices $8.16 revenue in 1 year’s time. Since most companies’ annual churn is less than 100%, this value keeps increasing over time.

For this client, it goes up like this:

Pretty cool, innit?

Now before I send you off to my booking page (😉) or other articles I wrote about Comparative Content Marketing, I’d like you to meet our team.

Best way to contact me is through this email: mihael@mihael.me

If you’d like to grab some Zoom coffee with me, here’s my goofy booking page: miha.youcanbook.me

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And to learn more about Comparative Content Marketing, check out these pieces I wrote: