How to Make the Right Product Recommendations to Online Shoppers
Product recommendations can be found in almost every online shop. No matter which method you choose, the end result can really impact your sales.
If you’re a relatively successful business owner, I’m willing to bet you have some competitors. If they are the market leaders in your niche, you might be struggling to win over customers, so you might be asking yourself how you can get some of those potential (or existing) customers from them. Today, we’ll be talking about how to create a landing page for your business that highlights your product as an alternative to your competition.
Why acknowledge the competition at all?
In classic marketing strategies, addressing the competition can be seen as selling yourself short or a cheap marketing tactic. Of course, if you’re the industry leader, you generally ignore the competition in your marketing (does Coca-Cola mention Pepsi often? Does McDonald’s ever mention Burger King?).
However, this is not the age of classic marketing. Shoppers don’t get informed by TV and radio spots in the same way that they used to. Today, shoppers research everything online, whether that means learning about a new product by googling it or reading online reviews before making a purchase.
However, people will also discover a product’s competition online as well. A savvy shopper wants to be informed and wants to know what alternatives they have to the product they’re already aware of. In fact, so much research is done online that a big chunk of your online strategy must be SEO-based.
Knowing what keywords your target audience searches is such an important factor for being discovered. That’s why acknowledging your competition online can actually be a very good thing these days.
Create a landing page to target customers looking for alternatives
To make the most out of Google, you have to think about how a googler googles (that was fun to type). In other words, figure out which keywords a potential shopper searches for on Google (or other search engines). Taking advantage of this can really benefit your business.
The rule is fairly simple. Create a landing page that is specifically designed to be found by users searching for your competitor’s alternative. For example, if you want a basic word processor and for one reason or another you don’t want to use Microsoft Word, you’d probably search for “Microsoft Word alternative” on Google.
This makes complete sense since Microsoft Word is a household name and, by far, the industry leader. It is therefore the starting point for any search for an alternative. If you’re a company that produces a similar program, then you’d want to build a landing page optimised for that keyword (i.e. Microsoft Word alternative) to win over customers.
Using a classic SEO strategy, you’ll want to carefully get these keywords into the most important parts of your page. That should include:
- The beginning of the page title
- Main headline (inside the H1 tag)
- URL
When choosing the right keywords, you can simply use Google’s Keyword Planner to double-check what the most searched keywords are. In most cases, it will be simply “X alternative” where X is the name of your competitor’s product. However, when double-checking the example I provided above, it seemed that “word alternative” was searched for 1,300 times per month, and “Microsoft Word alternative” was searched for 390 times per month, so it might be worth double-checking the most searched terms related to your competition.
Besides the three places mentioned above, you’ll also want to mention your competitor’s name a few more times in the body of your landing page. Just be careful not to overdo this.
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Being a good businessperson means knowing what the strengths and weaknesses of your product are. You obviously won’t be highlighting the weaknesses of your product, but knowing the strengths your product offers, especially in comparison to your competitors, is what is important here.
There is a reason that these people are searching for alternatives, so you’ll want to address these points directly in your landing page’s text. If you offer a free alternative to a paid product, make sure you highlight that fact. If your competitor’s product is overly complex, highlight the simplicity of your product.
Whatever points differentiate your product from the competition is what you’ll want to write about it in the body of the text.
Kingsoft created a landing page offering a free alternative to MS Word, with keywords appearing in the URL, page title, and headlines
How much money can you save by ranking high organically?
If you’re a good businessperson, I bet you’d also like to see some stats to back up this strategy. Well, first, let’s take a look at some CTR (click-through rate) statistics for Google.
As of 2017, the top three organic results get about 47% of the clicks from a search results page, according to Ignite Visibility. Specifically, the number one spot gets about 20.5%, the second spot gets 13.32%, and the third spot gets 13.14% of clicks.
After position three, these numbers fall into the single digits. You can imagine that these numbers start to become tiny fractions on page 2 of a search query. Clearly, your goal is to get to that first page and the higher you get on that page, the better.
Getting to this page can save your company lots of money in advertising. Let’s look at those search volume numbers for “word alternative” again as an example. Let’s say your landing page has the top organic spot for this search term. That means of the 1,300 monthly searchers, you’ll get 20.5% of them (267 organic visitors).
Google’s Keyword Planner gives you a suggested CPC (cost per click) bid suggestion for every keyword term if you decide to create a paid ad. For our keyword, this suggestion is £1.01. That means you’d pay nearly £300 per month for those visitors while ranking high organically is completely free.
Keep in mind that £1.01 is not a very high CPC. Depending on the keywords you’re targeting (and the products you’re selling), those CPCs can get much, much higher. With this “X alternative” strategy, you could potentially save your company thousands of dollars every month in online marketing costs.
Conclusion
If you’re a growing business, getting traffic to your website is important. Acknowledging your competition and offering your product as an alternative can be a great way to get people to your website. Building organic traffic in this way also has many benefits. It will not only get you more visitors, but it will also build up your reputation as a true alternative and will cost you nothing. Once the visitors arrive, you’ll have to convince them why they should give you a shot by differentiating yourself from the competition.
