'X Alternative' - free inbound marketing in spaces with larger competitors

Hey IH!

Lots of you, like me, are building products in markets with existing competition. This has some upsides (much simpler validation, for one) but also presents some marketing challenges.

In my own case (HTTP debugging tools) the largest tools (things like Fiddler and Charles) have been around for nearly 20+ years, and they're well-known enough that "Charles download" is bigger than even very direct SEO keywords in the space:

These tools are dated, and I have some clear benefits over them (and some passionate customers, from those who've discovered me) but it's hard to capture the attention of users where there's a known 'solution' to the problem you're solving.

I'd love to hear your suggestions for this kind of thing, but I've also been trying something to work on this myself, and I'd love to know what you think :-)

X Alternative

That these tools are well known is also their achilles heel. For any tool that large numbers of users are using, there'll always be some dissatisfied users, and if I can find them, they're my perfect target audience. These are users with substantial concrete need for the product, and they already know they need it, and deeply understand the concept. Perfect!

How do I get to them?

"X alternative" is exactly what everybody googles when they're using a tool and they don't like it. The bigger the competitor, the more searches that's going to see, and every one of them is a great potential customer. If I can capture a small percentage of that traffic, I can start to reach their dissatisfied users.

My plan

I've only just published this now, so results TBC (I'll publish an update once I've given the SEO some time to percolate!) but my plan is:

• Create an "X Alternative" landing page for each major competitor
• Include that phrase directly in the page URL, the page title (my titles are literally just "Fiddler Alternative -> HTTP Toolkit"), in the main H1, and similar text in the page content too, for maximum search relevance
• Precisely target the users of those competitors in the comparison itself, by highlighting the relative benefits my product has over in each case (how effectively this works for each competitor is itself really valuable information!)
• Link these pages internally in my site, to give them some initial link juice

In my case, those look like this:

• HTTP Toolkit Comparisons - linked in the site-wide footer, as a base page that links to each of the specific alternatives:
  • Fiddler Alternative
  • Charles Alternative
  • Chrome Devtools Alternative

As you can see, the pages themselves are structurally identical - once you have one of these set up, it's super easy to put together new ones for other competitors.

Other examples

I've been doing a bit of googling as part of this, and found a few similar examples of others doing the same thing:

"Newrelic alternative":

• https://raygun.com/new-relic-alternative - I really like the feature comparison table here, which clearly benefits them, but not exclusively, and gives you the key differentiating features at a glance
• https://scoutapm.com/newrelic-alternative - they've put "2020" into the page title, does that covert better in the search results?
• https://www.atatus.com/new-relic-alternative - notably they use "Atatus vs New Relic" in the title. My impression is this is a late game move: "A vs B" is a super popular search, but only once you're sufficiently popular that people are trying to compare you.

You get the idea. A few more, for extra inspiriation, from "Salesforce alternative":

• https://www.freshworks.com/freshsales-crm/salesforce-alternative/
• https://www.copper.com/crm-comparison/salesforce-alternative
• https://www.creatio.com/page/alternatives/salesforce

Bonus benefits

There's a few other nice benefits to this too:

• When you have competitors, lots of potential customers who do hear you will ask "how does it compare to X?". I've now got the perfect answer, complete with a call to action directly built in.
• You could, if you were particularly unscrupulous, target search ads against your competitors' product names and point them to these pages very effectively. Google ad pricing partly depends on your page's quality score which includes the landing page's relevance to the term. These pages are way more relevant for competitor targeting than my standard landing page.
• As the market and size of my competitors increases, this becomes more effective, and the search term becomes even more valuable.
• You can use your analytics for users landing on this page to judge how many users are unhappy with each of your competitors, how that changes, and how they then convert to your tool depending on how you present your differentiating factors. Complicated, but super valuable for market research, and expensive and complicated to do effectively by almost any other route.

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Have you tried this, or anything similar? Any other suggestions for marketing against well-known competitors?

I've also seen people publishing "Best N alternatives to X" as a list (with themselves included at the top, of course). No idea how well that performs, but it's an interesting move, I'd love to know how much success others have had there!