Alternative Keyword Plan to Capture Competitor’s Audience
Alternative Keyword strategy can be used anytime in your website’s life if you are looking to bring the traffic.
For product promotion, you should only do it if your product has different features than other products. You must do the alternative keywords if your product is following the skyscraper technique.
Skyscraper product is the product that does everything competitors are doing and then adds more features. Basically it is the best product.
Other Keyword plans:
- Internal Link Leading Content Strategy for New Blogs/Website
- Product Oriented Content Strategy for SaaS Product Startups
What are alternative keywords?
Alternative keywords are keywords with alternatives in them.
For example:
- Plesk alternative
- Godaddy alternative
- Mailchimp alternative
- Cloudflare alternative
People look for alternative solution because:
- They are tired of the service they are using (maybe poor support, just fed up with the software, want something better)
- They are still in comparing stage and looking what the alternatives are (can there be a better solution in low price)
- To find who are the competitors of the product to understand the value of the product (our enemies defines us more than our friends)
- They are trying to understand what the product does – so they find familiar alternative product (don’t know what Mailchimp do, but Mailchimp’s alternative Mailpoet do email marketing, so Mailchimp also do email marketing) – this is the logic behind this
What is an Alternative Keywords Strategy?
There are 2 type of alternative keywords:
#1 Brand Alternative
You are not alone in the market. There is competition.
People look for alternatives to get a better deal or better solution. You can claim that ranking and use it to promote your product.
For example: Kinsta doing alternatives to other hosting companies and putting the Kinsta as the best alternative in every article.
Example 2: Salesblink (a shitty email marketing software – yes I used) write all the comparison articles – pushing itself as the best email marketing tool.
Example 3: Social Champ and Social Pilot – both social media scheduling softwares doing comparison posts.
In Brand Alternative, we directly put our brand as the alternative to the competitor’s brand.
How to do keyword research?
- Find your competitors – that I am sure you already know
- {{competitor’s name}} alternative is your keyword
- Made several keywords
- Enter them into Ahrefs to find the Keyword volume
- Prioritize writing the post according to the keyword volume
#2 Feature/Tech alternative
The second way of doing it is finding the technology and features you are using.
Then looking up the alternatives, and then creating the alternative post for that tech/feature and put the tech/feature of your product as the best.
In doing so, you promote your product saying – we use the best tech.
For example: cpanel alternative
cPanel is the web hosting panel. A tool that every software company provides.
Magentician (which is the part of Cloudways) wrote the article on it – and Cloudways is at the top. Cloudways panel is put as the best alternative here.
Example 2: Kinsta did the same thing
According to Kinsta, their cpanel is best.
How to do keyword research?
- Learn the technical stack of your product
- Find the competitors (using apache, find apache alternative)
- {{your tech stack competitor’s name}} alternative is your keyword
- Put it to the ahrefs and find the volume of each one
The writer will play the game, ensuring the customer finds the alternative that your product is using the best one.
It will show your product in a good light.
Steal g2/Capterra/SourceForge keywords
Lately I am finding g2 ranking on tons of alternative keywords.
Enter the g2 in ahrefs and steal the low kd keywords.
Wrap Up
Should you do the alternative keywords?
If your product is not different, how will you propose the value. But you should capture your brand’s alternative page. So no one else takes the advantage of it.
Want help with content plans and strategies, feel free to get in touch.
