SaaS Competitors Brand Keyword Hijacking

The SaaS market is a competitive world! There will always be some competitors who will be ranking at the top and if you don’t plan to outrank them, you will end up at the bottom of Search Results or have to rely on Google Ads/Paid Ads.

So, how do you think you can compete with already top-ranking SaaS websites with your SaaS SEO Strategy? Well, there are many SaaS SEO strategies out there and you can read my SaaS SEO Checklist if you want to know some of the strategies I use for SaaS websites.

In this blog, you will learn about one of the most important and underlooked SaaS SEO strategies which I recommend to SaaS founders to include in their SaaS Marketing Strategy.

This strategy is called, Competitors Brand Keyword Hijacking. Let’s dive deep into it.

Competitors Brand Keyword Hijacking

There will always be some well-known competitors in your market segment who are top-ranking. If they are well-known then they will surely have good traffic for their brand keywords. What’s a brand keyword? In short, it’s the brand name of a product/company for which their official website ranks at the top. For example, “Grammarly” is a brand keyword for which their official website https://grammarly.com/ ranks at the top.

“Grammarly” is a brand keyword and it has a search volume of 2,740,000 in the US as per Semrush. And, if we add all of its broad match keywords’ search volume then it comes to around 3,500,000.

You can see on the above screenshot how many variations of the keyword “Grammarly” has.

When a brand is popular then people search for that brand name.

Why do people search for brand keywords?

Different searchers have different intent of searching. Some will be searching to just navigate to the official website. Some search to know pricing; for example, “Grammarly pricing”, some will search for coupon codes/discount codes related to the product, some will search for reviews, some will search about alternatives, and some will compare one brand with another, there’s where people use versus keywords for comparison. And, this is where our secret SaaS SEO strategy of hijacking brand keywords originates.

In the SaaS product market, people always search for a product’s reviews-ratings, pricing, competitors or alternatives, and discount codes, and compare one brand with others.

If you have ever bought any kind of SaaS product then you would have surely researched about the keyword before buying it and must have looked for discount codes or pricing of other alternatives. Almost all do it before buying. Especially those people who really want to buy the product. That means such kinds of keywords have high purchase intent of searchers. So, this a real gold mine, isn’t it?

How to hijack competitors’ brand keywords?

As discussed in the above section – why do people search about brand keywords, now let’s learn how to utilize this SaaS SEO strategy.

Episode 1: List down competitors

The first step is to make a list of competitors in your market. You might already have a list of your competitors but in any case you don’t have or want to know how to find them then just go to Google and search for the keyword you want to rank for and list down all of the domains coming up. You may leverage websites like G2 and Capterra to get the list of your competitors.

Episode 2: Find their brand keyword search volume

After listing down your competitors and their websites, now it’s time to find search volumes of the brand keywords. You can directly put their brand keyword in any keyword research tool or for better results check for the domain’s keyword rankings. You can do it through any SEO tool like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Ubersuggest. Find the search volume of their brand keywords.

Episode 3: Research about alternatives

After finding the search volume of your competitors’ brand keywords now you can sort the list according to the search volume. I will suggest you check on Google Trends as well to know the trend of these searches over a period of time. This will help you to know if any particular brand is in trend or a rising player in the market.

Now concatenate the brand keyword with the term “alternatives”. It will be like this – “{competitor brand keyword} alternatives”. Now, search for these alternative keywords on Google and find the top 10 performing pages on Google. Mostly you will notice these SaaS aggregators websites/reviews websites like G2 are ranking for such search queries. Just take the topmost organic ranking page for your search and extract the keywords it is ranking for along with the search volume data and traffic data. This will help you get the data about the brand for which many people are looking for alternatives.

There can be various reasons why people will search for alternatives. Some will search for better pricing plans, some for better features, can be for any reason. Sometimes their existing users also plan to switch to other alternatives.

Episode 4: Versus(Vs) Keywords Hunt

It’s time to find versus keywords of your competitors. Just concatenate your competitors’ brand keywords with “vs”. It will be like this – “{competitor brand keyword} vs”. Put these keywords into a keyword research tool and you will find the list of keywords people are comparing a brand with another. In this way, you will get to know the data about the most compared products in your domain.

Episode 5: The Hijack Time

As you have the list of alternative keywords and versus keywords related to your competitors, now it’s time to make content on them. For alternative keywords, you can make a list of alternatives and give brief explanation about each alternative you mention along with their features, pros and cons, and pricing. For versus keywords, compare one product/brand with another. You can compare 2 at a time or 3 at a time, like – Competitor 1 vs Competitor 2, or Competitor 1 vs Competitor 2 vs Your brand. I have explained more in detail about this in my SaaS SEO Checklist guide.

Quick Summary about SaaS Competitors Brand Keyword Hijacking

This is a good way to come into the eyes of highly potential buyers who are already using such products of your competitors or are planning to buy. This will help you to get a quick win! In order to make this SaaS SEO strategy successful you need to do thorough research about your competitors and write well about them will making content for alternative and versus keywords.

That’s it for this competitor’s Brand Keyword Hijacking! If you need my help with SaaS SEO service and the implementation of this strategy for your SaaS brand then contact me.