Welcome to another issue of my newsletter! This time I wanted to do a super detailed hands-on guide to leverage your competitors’ current SEO strategy to uncover new acquisition opportunities by building high-intent & high-volume website landing pages for your SaaS.

In other words, you’ll be able to attract users who are currently searching for tools/software that support their use cases.

I won’t lie, it’s long and full of details to make it actionable. Also, you will need to use a paid SEO tool: Ahrefs.

So let’s get into it! I really hope you enjoy it :)

You know what? Almost every time I hear about building an SEO strategy for a SaaS, it’s all about blogging or top-of-the-funnel content, i.e., “Educational” or “Informative” content.

The truth is that if you are a SaaS founder, or a Marketer working in a SaaS startup, especially if it’s B2B, there are chances that you can uncover dozens or even hundreds of opportunities to take your acquisition strategy to the next level.

Does this mean you don’t need to create top-of-the-funnel content?

Nope, that would be very far from reality, but, educational and informative content is a long-term investment which is OK, you need it, but you also need to make sure your short and mid-term Go-To-Market strategy is in place.

I sum this up as follow:

Top-of-the-funnel content: Generates Demand

Bottom-of-the-funnel content: Captures Existing Demand

And here’s where your product pages come in.

What’s a SaaS Product Page?

For SaaS businesses, product pages are dedicated website pages that describe a single feature or use case directly related to the product.

The design behind these landing pages is to acquire traffic on the website, usually through Organic Traffic (Google, Bing, etc.), and convert users by A) Signing up to the product or B) Request a free trial/demo.

Here’s a HubSpot’s example. You can access many of their Product Pages from their footer, targeting different use cases.

And here’s their “Email Marketing Software” product page

If we check this product page URL on Ahrefs, we can see that it’s currently ranking for 90 different keywords on the top 10 results (first page):

Now take into consideration that HubSpot has 100+ of these landing pages, which means they’re getting hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of visitors each month thanks to –only–, their dedicated product pages.

Those visitors are looking for specific tools/use cases that the HubSpot products solve and support. In other words, high-intent traffic.

Product pages can be one of your main Acquisition levers if you do it right.

And here’s where the fun part starts!

I will explain, in 4 steps, how you can leverage your current competitors’ strategy to uncover dozens or even hundreds of opportunities and start stealing their traffic.

How to Find Hundreds of SEO Product Pages Opportunities by Stealing your Competitors Strategy

First things first, you’ll need access to an SEO tool to collect all the data you will need. I use Ahrefs, but you can get a similar outcome by using Semrush or any other tool in the market (however, you’ll need to adjust some steps).

The Example: A Cloud-Based Online Video Editor Tool

To make this how-to guide more actionable, I will pretend that I’m a marketer working in an early-stage SaaS Company that wants to market a Video Editor Tool product.

Step 1. Make a list of your 3-5 closest competitors.

This step is critical that you do it right. Write down the competitors that are targeting the same market segment.

In this case, they would be:

• clideo.com

• clipchamp.com

• veed.io

• flexclip.com

I will follow this process with one competitor only to keep it simple.

In this case, my main competitor would be VEED.io

I’m choosing VEED because they’ve been doing a fantastic job when it comes to SEO since I know them. I even tweeted about it.

Borja Prieto @BorjaPrietoB

Name ONE SaaS you think is rocking it with their SEO strategy. I'll start 👇 @veedstudio – their link building and content efforts are just out of this world. Top-notch marketing team. Shoutout to @dianagetssocial as she's leading the content team since the very beginning 👏

11:25 AM ∙ Nov 8, 2021

Step 2. Build a list with your competitors’ product page URLs

You have to create a Google Sheets containing all the product page URLs from our competitor.

Don’t worry. I’ll provide you with a template in a moment.

There are two different ways to do this, and both of them using Ahrefs:

Option A: Filter down pages by using the “URL” filter in Ahrefs

More often than not, SaaS websites are built following common URL structures or patterns.

I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of product pages like:

www.abc.com/product/feature-A

www.abc.com/product/feature-B

If we check veed.io’s main navigation menu, we can quickly see two types of product pages:

And, by taking a look at their URL structure, I can see that:

• “Tools” landing pages always contain /tools/ in their URLs

• “Create” landing pages always contain /create/ in their URLs

So, let’s log into your Ahrefs account and do the following:

1. Enter your competitor’s domain in Ahref’s Site Explorer Tool

2. Go to the “Organic Keywords” report under “Organic search”

3. Add a position filter between 1 and 10 and a minimum volume of 10

4. Then make sure we don’t see “Sitelinks” results by going to SERP Features → Where target doesn’t rank → “Sitelinks”

And now, by using the “URL” filter, add the following:

BOOM! You nailed it!

Now export this data as a CSV and save it. We’ll use it later.

Option B: Filter down pages by using the “Keyword” filter in Ahrefs

Option B is handy when our competitor's website doesn’t have a clear URL structure. Option A would be useless because we can’t follow a specific pattern to identify product pages.

Let’s get into it!

1. Enter your competitor’s domain in Ahref’s Site Explorer Tool

2. Go to the “Organic Keywords” report under “Organic search”

Perfect! We can now see that veed.io ranks for 122k+ keywords in the US. But this is not actionable. How can I play this list out to get the URLs of their product pages?

3. Add a position filter between 1 and 10 and a minimum volume of 10

4. Then make sure we don’t see “Sitelinks” results by going to SERP Features → Where target doesn’t rank → “Sitelinks”

It should look something like this:

Now we have 15,192 keywords but are still very far from being actionable, so now we will do some magic :)

Usually, SaaS product pages share common parts of keywords like “platform”, “app”, “tool”, “software”.

By using the “Keyword” filter, we’re going to use these keywords, just like this:

And here we go! We now have a keyword list of 762 keywords.

Ignore the keywords for now. We’re looking to build a list of all the product page URLs, as I said before. As you can see in the image above, all URLs are product landing pages promoting specific features of the veed.io product.

Export this list, and let’s move on to the next step.

Step 3. Build a final list of your competitor’s product page URLs

We need to build a definitive list of veed.io’s Product Page URLs.

To do so, you have to open up this Google Sheets template I created (make sure to remove the data from “Raw Data” and “Final List” tabs first) and import both CSV files you have previously downloaded from Ahrefs.

When you finish, it should look like this:

Now select the entire worksheet by clicking on the top left corner:

Now click on Data → Data Cleanup → Remove Duplicates

Check the “Data has header row” option and click on “Remove Duplicates”

Perfect! Now let’s move into the “URL List” worksheet.

It’s a pivot table where you’ll see a list of unique URLs from your competitor's website sorted from higher to lower monthly Search Volume and with the averages for Keyword Difficulty and Current Position.

Select and copy all the rows from this tab and paste them (paste special → only values) into the “Final List” worksheet.

The final result should be something like this:

We have to manually check them to make sure all of these URLs are product pages.

So, any URL that’s not a product page should be removed; blog posts, pricing pages, resources pages, homepage, etc. This step is crucial, don’t skip it.

And there you go, we now have a final list with dozens or even hundreds of your competitor’s product pages, with Search Volume, Difficulty, and Average Position data.

My final list contains around 225 unique URLs from Veed.io. Impressive!

Keep in mind that I did this for one competitor only. Depending on your market segment, you may want to repeat the process with more competitors—up to 5.

Now, we’re ready for the next step: Content and Keyword research.

Prepare yourself. This is going to be huge :)

Step 4. Content and Keyword Research

So, we now have to do in-depth competitive research for each competitor’s URLs.

Such a process will result in a comprehensive list of keywords that we’ll use later to build our SEO Content Strategy.

To keep this tutorial as straightforward as possible, I’ll only follow the process for one of Veed.io’s URLs.

Let’s get started!

First of all, make a copy of this another template I made for the keyword research.

Now, go back to the spreadsheet where you have the list of your competitor’s URLs.

In my case, I will start with the URL with the higher Search Volume, which is:

https://www.veed.io/tools/video-compressor

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool, paste the URL, and select “Exact URL”:

Now go to the “Organic Keywords” report and apply the following filters:

• Position: 1-5

• Volume: from 10

• SERPs Features: where target doesn’t rank: Sitelinks

Export this list of keywords.

Import them into the new spreadsheet. You should get a huge keyword list, something like this:

Now create a filter and apply the following conditionals:

• Current URL (Column O): Is Not Empty

• Current Position (Column J): Is Less Than 6

Lastly, create a new column called “LANG”

Then, use the following formula:

=DETECTLANGUAGE(A2)

Drag down the formula to the rest of the rows.

This will detect the language of each keyword. Once the formula finishes loading, filter out the “LANG” column to include “en” results only.

Now, copy the entire column A (Keyword) and paste it into the “Raw Data (Keywords)” worksheet:

Remove duplicates by clicking on Data → Data Cleanup → Remove Duplicates

Awesome! Now copy all these keywords and paste them into Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer tool:

Export the results in a CSV and import them into the spreadsheet.

Follow these steps:

1. Create a filter for all columns

2. Sort them out by highest “Volume”

3. Now remove all the unnecessary columns and reorder them. It should look like this:
   

   

4. The “CPC” column is set 0 to the rows with no values.

5. Now copy this data over the “All Data - Content Keywords” tab, make sure you’re using the “Values Only” option to paste it. Something like this:
   

   

On this tab, you’ll see two new columns, “Proposed URL” and “Main Keyword”.

For the main keyword, you have to copy the keyword with the highest volume from column C, paste it on Column B, and drag it down to the rest of the rows.

As for the “Proposed URL” column, this is the URL we’ll use for this new landing page. It must be built with the main keyword in it, so in my case, it would be something like: /video-compressor/

The final result should be something like this:

Why is this step necessary?

If you check the tab “Content Mapping” now, you’ll see a beautiful pre-built pivot table with the data from the other tab, making it easier to analyze.

Amazing, eh? :)

Now you have to repeat this process for the following competitor URL. Rinse and repeat until you finish with all of them.

I did this a few more times, and here’s the result:

If you follow the process with all your competitor’s URLs, you’ll end up with dozens and even hundreds of opportunities for your website.

In case you have doubts, here’s a quick explanation of the “Content Mapping” tab:

• Proposed URL (Column A): The URL you will use when publishing this product page on your website

• Main Keyword (Column B): The main keyword for this landing page (used in the URL, H1, Title, etc.)

• Keyword (Column C): All the different keywords you must use throughout the page’s content to rank for as many keywords as possible

• KD (Column D): The average difficulty among all keywords.

• Volume (Column E): The total search volume (per month) for a given landing page

• CPC (Column F): Average CPC (Google Ads) for the keywords of a given landing page

• Traffic Potential (Column G): The average traffic potential (calculated by Ahrefs) you can get monthly for a specific landing page if you rank 1st

Here’s the final result for a recent research I did at Databox:

Next Steps

Now it’s your turn to create these landing pages. Work with your team to prioritize which landing pages are essential for you, marketing and business-wise, and set a priority.

But remember, this content is designed to capture existing demand. In other words, people who are ready to buy a solution like yours. So give it the importance it deserves :)

Would you like another issue digging into how to manage and organize the content creation process once you get a list of potential new landing pages like this one? Please tell me in the comments!

If you liked this issue, please share it with others! Let’s help other SaaS Marketers :)

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