One day I was searching for a software product—an online helpdesk—when I stumbled upon a clever tactic that a startup was using to get users

How to Take Customers from Competitors with Alternative SEO Pages

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2024-09-08 15:00:05

One day I was searching for a software product—an online helpdesk—when I stumbled upon a clever tactic that a startup was using to get users thanks to their (bigger) competitor’s popularity, and the more popular the competitor gets, the more users the startup gets.

It started when I was searching for an online helpdesk product. The first one that came to mind was Zendesk, but I wanted to find more options to consider, so I searched on Google for [zendesk alternative]. Expecting to find various “Top 10” lists, I was surprised to see Freshdesk as one of the top results—specifically their Zendesk Alternative page:

My first thought was how lucky they are to be a top result for a keyword that has a competitor’s name. Then I realized this was absolutely intentional; the page was created and optimized for the primary purpose of getting traffic from the search phrase ”zendesk alternative.”

To find out, I used Adwords Keyword Planner to estimate the average monthly searches for the phrase [zendesk alternative], which is 1,000.