Bottom-of-funnel keywords: the pages that pay for the whole program

A page targeting “best CRM for construction companies” converted at 9.1% for a client last year. Their blog average was 0.4%. Same site, same offer, same design. The difference was entirely who was arriving.

Bottom-of-funnel pages are the least glamorous asset in a content program and they carry most of its revenue. Here is the full pattern set, with what actually goes on each one.

The nine patterns

Alternative pages. “[Competitor] alternative.” The searcher is already paying someone else and has decided to leave, or is close to it. Highest intent of anything you can rank for. Usually 20 to 300 searches a month for a well-known competitor, and worth building even at 20.

Comparison pages. “[You] vs [competitor]” and “[competitor A] vs [competitor B].” Slightly lower intent than alternatives because some searchers are early, but volume is higher and these can be built at scale if you have several relevant competitors.

Category plus qualifier. “[Category] for [industry]”, “[category] for [company size]”, “[category] with [integration]”, “[category] for [compliance regime].” This is the deepest well and the one most companies barely touch. A single client of ours has 34 of these.

Best-of and top-N. “Best [category] software.” Hard, dominated by review sites and affiliates, but not impossible if you write an honest one that includes yourself with a caveat about who should not pick you.

Pricing queries. “[Category] pricing”, “how much does [category] cost”, “[competitor] pricing.” Buyers building a business case. If your pricing page is gated or vague, you lose all of these, and the searcher goes to a competitor who publishes numbers.

Migration queries. “Migrate from [competitor] to [you]”, “[competitor] export data”, “switching from [competitor].” Small volume, extremely high intent, and easy to win because your competitor certainly has not written it.

Integration queries. “[Your category] + [tool they already use].” If your buyer runs Salesforce and you integrate with Salesforce, that is a page. This scales into programmatic territory once you have more than about thirty.

Feature and capability queries. “Does [category] do [specific thing]”, “[category] with SSO”, “[category] API.” Tiny volume individually. Collectively substantial, and they are the questions that stall deals.

Objection queries. “Is [category] secure”, “[category] SOC 2”, “[category] GDPR”, “[category] implementation time.” These rarely rank for much, and they earn their place because AEs send them mid-deal. Build them for the sales team and take the search traffic as a bonus.

What goes on the page

A comparison page that ranks and converts has a specific shape, and it is not the shape of a marketing landing page.

It opens with the answer. Not a paragraph about how choosing software is hard, but a two-sentence summary of who should pick which. The searcher has an urgent question and rewarding them immediately is both good UX and, empirically, good for engagement metrics.

Then a comparison table with real specifics. Pricing tiers with numbers. Deployment options. Integration counts. Support SLAs. If you fudge these, someone will notice and post about it.

Then the honest section. Where the competitor is genuinely better. Every client argues about this and every client comes around after the first quarter, because the pages with the honest section convert better than the ones without. My working theory is that it changes the reader’s stance from defensive to trusting, and because it makes the rest of the page believable by contrast.

Then proof. A customer who switched, with a number. Not a logo wall.

Then a specific next step. “Book a demo” is weak on a comparison page. “See a 6-minute recorded walkthrough of the migration” is much better, because the reader is comparing, not buying yet, and asking for a call is one commitment too far.

Length usually lands between 1,200 and 2,000 words. Longer than that on a comparison page tends to mean padding.

What to expect, numerically

From programs we have run, roughly:

Alternative and comparison pages start ranking in 6 to 14 weeks if the domain has any authority at all, and convert at 3 to 9%. Category-plus-qualifier pages take 8 to 20 weeks and convert at 2 to 7%. Pricing and objection pages often rank within a month because so little competes with them, and their conversion rate is hard to measure because their job is mostly to unblock a deal already in flight.

These are medians from B2B software programs with domain ratings between 30 and 60. A brand new domain will be slower on all of them. An established one in a soft category can be much faster.

The number that matters more than any of these is how many of them you build. Fifteen commercial pages is a program. Three is a pilot.

The mistake nearly everyone makes

Thin templated versions of these pages, published all at once.

We inherited a site with 60 “vs” pages that were the same 400 words with the competitor name swapped. Four were indexed. The other 56 sat in “Crawled — currently not indexed” for a year. The company had concluded that comparison pages do not work.

They work. Mail merges do not. If you cannot write 1,200 genuinely specific words about a competitor, you do not know enough about them to publish a comparison, and the page will be both bad and obvious.

Build eight properly. Measure. Then build the next eight.

Where to start on Monday

Take your last twenty closed-won deals and find, for each one, which competitor was also in the evaluation. Rank those competitors by frequency. Build an alternative page and a versus page for the top three.

That is four to six weeks of work and it will produce more pipeline than the next six months of blog posts.