23 Compare Page Templates CEOs Used to Dominate SEO

In this article, you will learn exactly how top SaaS CEOs use “Compare Pages” to generate millions of dollars in new revenue, complete with real-world examples and actionable playbooks. These founders have mastered the art of turning high-intent search traffic—prospects literally searching for your product versus a competitor’s—into paying customers. You’ll get the 6-part strategy to launch your own Compare Pages, backed by over 40 case studies you can use for inspiration. These examples were collected directly from CEOs of companies with combined revenues well over $100m when they keynoted Founderpath events.

The 6 Part Strategy for High-Converting Compare Pages

Compare pages are a powerful SEO tactic for capturing high-intent users actively evaluating solutions. These users are typing queries like “[Your Brand] vs. [Competitor]” or “[Competitor] Alternative” into Google. By creating a dedicated page that addresses their query head-on, you control the narrative and position your product as the superior choice. Here is the playbook to dominate this channel.

1. Target High-Intent Keywords: The foundation of this strategy is targeting keywords that signal a user is in the buying phase. Focus on “vs” and “alternative” variations. Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, emphasizes focusing on these bottom-of-the-funnel keywords like “HubSpot vs Zoho” because they are typically less competitive and attract high-converting traffic.
2. Be Honest and Build Trust: Your comparison can’t be a one-sided sales pitch. It needs to be an honest, balanced review that acknowledges your competitor’s strengths while clearly highlighting where your product excels. Philippe Lehoux of Missive, who grew his company to over $2.1 million in ARR, attributes the success of his compare pages to their honesty. They clearly state any shortcomings of their product compared to a competitor, which builds trust and attracts users who are a better fit for their solution.
3. Structure for SEO and Readability: Use a clear, templated format. This helps search engines understand your content and makes it easy for users to scan. ClickUp’s CEO, Zeb Evans, utilized this by creating a dedicated “Compare” section in their website footer, with templated pages for every major competitor like Asana and Trello. Each page uses a consistent layout with feature checklists, screenshots, and clear H1 tags.
4. Use Social Proof Liberally: Incorporate customer testimonials, reviews, and ratings directly on the page. This reinforces your claims and provides third-party validation. Many successful compare pages, like those from Missive, end with a wall of positive tweets and reviews from happy customers.
5. Automate and Scale with Programmatic SEO: Don’t just build one page. Create a system to produce compare pages for every relevant competitor. Madhav Bhandari of Storylane used a programmatic approach to build out all their comparison pages, allowing them to scale their SEO efforts rapidly and dominate a wide range of competitor-related search terms.
6. Rinse and Repeat: This isn’t a one-time setup. As new competitors emerge and products evolve, your compare pages need to be updated. The most successful companies treat this as an ongoing process, consistently refreshing content and building new pages to maintain their search rankings and capture new traffic.

40+ Examples of SaaS Companies Winning with Compare Pages

Here are over 40 real-world examples from SaaS founders and CEOs who are using competitor comparison pages and alternative pages to drive significant growth and revenue.

1. The CEO of Missive, Philippe Lehoux, explained how creating honest “Us vs. Them” pages for competitors like Spark Mail and Outpost was key to reaching $2.1 million in ARR. These pages rank high on Google because they provide a genuine, detailed comparison, even admitting where the competitor might be a better fit, which builds immense trust with potential customers.
2. Zeb Evans at ClickUp shared that a core part of their early SEO strategy was building out a comprehensive suite of “compare pages” targeting every major competitor, from Asana vs. Trello to Monday.com alternatives. This strategy helped them bootstrap to over $25 million by capturing search traffic already in the consideration phase.
3. Eric Siu of Single Grain advocates for targeting high-converting, bottom-of-the-funnel keywords like “HubSpot vs Zoho” and “Paychex vs Gusto.” He notes that these “alternative” and “vs” pages are often less competitive and attract users who are ready to make a purchase decision, driving his agency’s growth to over $10 million.
4. Kevin Indig, former Head of SEO at G2, explained that a cornerstone of their SEO dominance was creating and defending rankings for “alternatives” and “pricing” keywords for thousands of software companies. By surfacing the sheer number of reviews in the search snippets, they drove higher click-through rates and solidified G2’s position as the go-to resource for software comparison.
5. Patrick Stiles of Videla Dexcom, competing in the crowded video hosting space, explicitly stated they created a compare page targeting their main competitor, Wistia. This direct comparison page is a key tactic for highlighting their unique features and converting users looking for a Wistia alternative as they grew past $10k in MRR.
6. Madhav Bhandari of Storylane detailed their “Demo-Led SEO” strategy, which involved programmatically building comparison pages. This approach allowed them to scale from 25k to over 150k monthly visitors in just three months by systematically targeting and ranking for competitor keywords.
7. Rytis Lauris from Omnisend, a marketing automation platform doing over $50 million in ARR, competes with giants like HubSpot and Mailchimp by creating deep, authoritative content around competitor comparisons and alternatives, helping them carve out a significant market share.
8. Michael Cooney of WhatConverts, a bootstrapped company competing with VC-funded giants, used insights from their paid ad campaigns on competitor keywords to inform their organic SEO strategy. This allowed them to build content that directly addressed user pain points discovered from competitor-based searches, helping them grow to over $3.6 million in ARR.
9. The founder of Rank Watch, Vaibhav Kakkar, grew his SEO software to $180k MRR by creating highly detailed content and infographics on topics like “future of SEO.” This included comparisons to established players, positioning his tool as a forward-thinking alternative.
10. Adam Sandman, CEO of Inflectra, which passed $10 million in ARR, uses “listicles” to compare his testing tools against a field of competitors. By using AI to generate unique pros and cons for each tool, his pages rank in Google’s helpful content boxes for terms like “top requirements traceability tools.”
11. Smart Suite’s CEO, John Darbyshire, launched his work management platform into a crowded market by going after comparison sites. His strategy from day one, which led to $1.2 million in ARR in just four weeks, was to get listed on platforms where users were actively comparing tools like Monday, ClickUp, and Airtable.
12. Nikhil Aitharaju of Use Topic, which hit $20k MRR in its first year, explained that targeting competitor-related keywords through Google SEM and content was a key growth channel. This allowed them to find and convert users who were looking for alternatives to existing SEO content tools.
13. Andrew Geisel, who acquired Planleave, identified that the “leave management” space was less competitive than broader HRMS categories. His initial go-to-market strategy is focused on winning long-tail keywords like “vacation trackers” where larger competitors are present but not dominant.
14. Dan Greenberg of Sharethrough, a native advertising platform, grew by positioning his company as a vital alternative to the “duopoly” of Google and Facebook for publishers. Their content and sales strategy focuses on being the better option for publishers underserved by the tech giants.
15. Scott Brandley from ShopperApproved bootstrapped his company to $7.5 million in ARR by creating a disruptive USP and then marketing it heavily against larger, VC-backed competitors like Yotpo and Trustpilot. Their messaging is centered on being the more effective and higher-rated alternative.
16. Tina Banerjee, founder of UserPeak, is building a user testing platform to compete with UserTesting and UserZoom by offering a more accessible pricing model. Her strategy involves creating content that frames UserPeak as the ideal alternative for small to medium-sized businesses priced out of enterprise solutions.
17. Marvin Russell of Checkly successfully ranked #1 on Google for “checklist” against countless to-do list apps by creating a superior, simpler product. His SEO strategy was to dominate a specific high-traffic keyword by offering a free tool that was better than the paid alternatives.
18. Marco Saric of Plausible Analytics grew his Google Analytics alternative to $23k MRR in its first 12 months by publishing highly-trafficked blog posts like “Why you should remove Google Analytics from your website.” This content directly positioned Plausible as the privacy-focused alternative, attracting a dedicated user base.
19. Stanislav Dimitrov, CEO of NightEye, achieved 2,500 paying customers by dominating SEO for “[Website] + dark mode” keywords (e.g., “Amazon dark mode”). His team systematically created articles for every major website that didn’t have a native dark mode, positioning their browser extension as the go-to solution.
20. Productsup’s CEO, Johannis Hatt, grew to $12 million in ARR by educating the market on the importance of product data and positioning his tool as the superior solution for managing product content feeds against competitors. Their initial traction came from targeting brands with a high number of SKUs who were struggling with manual processes.
21. The founder of Pub Ocean built a $25 million revenue business by creating content on their own portfolio of sites (like Scribol.com) and then using that experience to sell their ad management technology to other publishers as a better alternative to managing it themselves.
22. Natesh Mandy of Hiver grew his help desk software to over $10 million in ARR by building it directly on top of Gmail. Their primary SEO keyword is “help desk for gmail,” which perfectly positions them against competitors like Front for users who don’t want to leave their existing email client.
23. Chris from Blackthorn built his company to over $16 million in ARR by focusing on the Salesforce AppExchange. While not a traditional compare page, their strategy involves being the top-rated alternative for event management within the Salesforce ecosystem, a niche where they can win against broader competitors.
24. Neil Patel, CEO of NP Digital, acquired competitors like Ubersuggest and Answer The Public to serve as free alternatives to paid tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. These free tools act as a massive lead generation engine, feeding thousands of qualified leads to his nine-figure ad agency.
25. Sri Swaminathan of Factors.ai, which grew 6x after a pivot, developed a free “LinkedIn Advisor” tool. This lead magnet analyzes competitor LinkedIn ads, providing value upfront and positioning Factors.ai as a strategic alternative for optimizing LinkedIn ad spend.
26. Workable’s CEO, Nikos Moraitakis, scaled his recruiting software to over $20 million in ARR by creating a massive resource hub with thousands of job descriptions and interview question templates. This SEO play attracted users searching for hiring resources, who then discovered Workable as an alternative to managing the process manually.
27. Markus Stahlberg from N.Rich shared a playbook to “use your competitors’ weaknesses as your strengths.” This involves researching G2 and Capterra for competitor complaints and then creating targeted ads and content that highlight how your product solves those specific problems, capturing users searching for alternatives.
28. Kirsty Finlayson from Chameleon described how their product marketing experiments doubled conversion rates. While not a direct compare page, their website personalization shows visitors how Chameleon would look with their own branding, directly competing against the generic feel of other onboarding tools.
29. Kyle Poyar of OpenView highlighted Grammarly’s strategy of creating hundreds of landing pages for common grammar questions (“no one vs. no-one”). This user-focused SEO approach introduces their product as a better alternative to manually searching for answers.
30. The CEO of WhatConverts explained their go-to-market strategy uses “call tracking” as a mousetrap. Users searching for call tracking solutions—a feature offered by many larger, more expensive marketing suites—find their focused tool and are then upsold on a full lead tracking platform, positioning it as a more efficient alternative.
31. The team at ClickUp initially drove traffic by writing blog posts on keywords like “Asana vs Trello,” inserting their new tool into the consideration set for users already comparing established project management platforms.
32. The new CEO of Planleave outlined his SEO strategy to compete against large HRMS platforms by focusing on less competitive long-tail keywords like “vacation trackers,” where he can establish a foothold as a dedicated alternative.
33. Chris Dickey of Visably is building his tool to provide intelligence on where a brand’s competitors are showing up in search results across PR, e-commerce, and organic links. This data is then used to create strategies to outrank competitors on specific SERPs.
34. The founder of Checkly leveraged his deep SEO expertise to rank #1 for high-volume keywords like “checklist,” creating a simple, free tool that performed better than paid alternatives and drove tens of thousands of monthly users.
35. The CEO of Use Topic, which hit $21k in MRR, used Google SEM to target keywords and users searching for alternatives to their competitors, although he noted the CAC was high at $500 per customer.
36. AlgoPix’s CEO Ori Greenberg, whose tool hit $2.4M in revenue, moved upmarket by focusing on enterprise c-suite clients. Their outreach is hyper-personalized, delivering unique insights about a prospect’s market share versus their competitors in the very first cold email.
37. Guillaume Bardet of Testimonial.to created a “SAS alternative” subreddit to rank for competitor keywords without creating pages on their main domain. This clever SEO tactic allows them to control the narrative for users searching for alternatives to their competitors.
38. The CEO of Planable, a social media collaboration tool doing over $3,500 in MRR, focuses their content marketing on being the best solution for agencies, a niche that allows them to compete against larger, more generalized tools.
39. The founder of Videlitics, a video platform for marketers, explained that a core part of their growth strategy is a detailed “vs Wistia” page that breaks down all the features his platform has that Wistia doesn’t, directly targeting users of the market leader.
40. The founder of a virtual assistant tool called Erum, which reached $10k MRR, used inherent virality with a “Powered by” badge as a key growth channel. Users on websites with the tool would see the badge and click to discover it as an alternative for their own site search.
41. Steve Pockross, CEO of Verblio, a content marketplace doing over $260k per month, competes against larger players by offering a more flexible, scalable, and personalized solution for agencies and SMBs who are underserved by enterprise-focused content platforms.
42. The founder of Fitbots, an OKR software that hit $25k MRR, uses high-quality content around “OKR templates” and “OKR coaching” to outrank larger competitors. Their strategy is to be the most authoritative source on the topic, attracting users looking for expert-led alternatives to generic tools.

Conclusion

You’ve just learned how more than 40 top SaaS founders leverage competitor comparison pages to drive millions in revenue. By targeting high-intent keywords, building trust through honesty, and creating scalable content systems, they systematically turn their competitors’ brand equity into their own user acquisition channel. To start implementing these strategies and track your own SaaS metrics for free, connect your Stripe account to Founderpath today.

Founderpath invests in ambitious founders looking to grow fast. Click here to submit a capital request