I spend a lot of time looking at purchase intent blog posts — sometimes because I’m trying to update one for a client, sometimes because I’m trying to outrank them, and sometimes (like today) because I’m looking for examples to share.
Occasionally, I’m wowed by what I find.
Very occasionally.
More often, the only thing that’s exciting about these posts is how easy they’ll be to outrank.
So what is it about these posts that make them so bad — and me so confident in my ability to create content that outranks them?
That’s the topic of today’s newsletter. What are the tell-tale signs of a bad purchase intent blog post? What are the qualities of a good one? And who’s out there doing things right?
Why bad purchase-intent posts are bad for business
Let’s first take a look at what makes a purchase-intent blog post bad — for both the people who encounter it in the wild and your business.
Bad purchase intent posts erode prospects’ trust
I’m pretty sure the worst purchase intent posts I see were written with only two goals in mind:
- Rank number one for the target keyword.
- Sell our tool by putting it at the top of the list and making all of the other tools in the list sound like garbage.
Yes, you can get a post like this to rank when you have little competition in the SERPs and are willing to spend a ton of money building backlinks to it.
But it’s going to be so easy for someone like me to come along and take your spot. And more importantly, you’re eroding the trust of everyone who stumbles across your post.
Let me take you on a tangent for a moment.
I worked for a company that was building a tool that allowed people to do full trials of different types of software in a category side-by-side. As part of their market research, they spoke with hundreds of B2B buyers.
One thing that kept coming up in the research: “You can’t trust the reviews on software review sites because we all know they’re gamed.”
We all work in B2B. We all know we’re all out there paying only our best and happiest customers to write reviews for us on these sites.
The result: no one trusts review sites anymore.
Now, let’s think about that in terms of purchase intent content: we’re also all out there trying to get our sites to rank for purchase intent keywords. And we all put our own tools at the top of our lists of “the best.”
You’re not pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes. They see you.
The thing is: even though they know you’re doing this, buyers don’t really care. All they care about is finding the right tool to solve their problems.
But when everything you write about your tool is glowing and everything you write about the other tools on the list is scathing, they know you’re not helping them find the right tool.
So they click the back button and head for the number two search result.
Bad purchase intent posts generate the wrong leads
You have an ICP. Your tool is the best tool for someone. And a competitor’s tool is probably the best tool for someone else.
Bad purchase intent blog posts don’t bother to acknowledge this. They’re not trying to generate the right leads — you know, the ones that actually turn into revenue for the business.
The people publishing these posts are just looking to wow leadership with a hockey-stick-shaped graph. They do this by making their tool sound like the best choice for every persona, use case, and need — whether or not that’s true at all.
Meanwhile, trial-to-paid conversion rates are dropping, and the sales team is furious about how much time they’re wasting on calls with unqualified leads.
Bad purchase intent posts don’t help you sell your product
Here’s the typical structure of a bad purchase intent blog post:
## 1. The Tool Being Sold
Several in-depth paragraphs with multiple screenshots and lots of details, possibly even broken out into subsections.
## 2. Every Other Tool on the List
A generic screenshot of the tool’s homepage followed by 1-2 paragraphs with less depth and detail than you would have gotten if you’d just used ChatGPT to write the post.
Here’s the problem with this approach: it doesn’t get your prospects any closer to making a decision. They’re not going to read any of the paragraphs under your headers. They’re just going to scan the headings, put together a shortlist, and investigate those tools on their own.
That investigation might lead them to competitors with a stronger point-of-view, more aggressive sales tactics, and more scathing things to say about your product.
You might get on their shortlists initially, but you might not stay there.
The qualities of a good purchase intent blog post
To write a purchase intent blog post that’s actually good, your goals need to go well beyond just ranking number one in search and generating leads by putting your tool at the top of the list.
The best purchase intent blog posts:
- Are honest about who their tool is and isn’t best for. If your tool is better for B2B SaaS and a competitor’s tool is better for ecommerce, say so. You’ll not only generate higher-quality leads, but you’ll also make it more likely that the prospects who are reading your post will trust the other things you have to say.
- Provide helpful details about every tool — not just yours. This means that the person writing the post either needs to have used all of the tools on the list or done deep research on them to understand what they are and aren’t capable of (skimming a couple of competitor landing pages doesn’t count as deep research).
The best purchase intent blog posts help prospects make the right decision, build trust in your brand before the trial or demo, and generate qualified leads.
They bring in leads who are more informed, easier to sell to, and less likely to fall for a line fed to them by a competitor’s close-at-all-costs salesperson.
And, bringing it back to SEO, purchase intent blog posts that actually do the things above rank highly quickly, and they often earn the number-one spot with no backlink building at all.
4 examples of good purchase intent blog posts
Let’s take all of this from theory to practice by looking at four examples of good purchase intent blog posts.
1. TestBox’s best demo automation software blog post
My first example is a post I wrote for TestBox targeting the keyword “demo automation software.”
As I write this newsletter today, it’s ranking number one for its target keyword and outranking sites like G2, Gartner, and all of TestBox’s biggest competitors.
Rather than going from the introduction straight into my list of tools, I spent a decent amount of time walking readers through the four different types of demo automation software, explaining what they do, who they’re best for, and what stage of the funnel they’re ideal for.
Why? Demo automation is a newer software category that contains a wide variety of tools that are all better for different things. But most people looking into the category don’t know that.
By starting the blog post off with an explanation of the different types of tools in the category, I can point readers to the right tools for their specific needs and use cases.
Plus, I can ensure that the people who read this blog post and then sign up for a demo are fully informed about what TestBox is and isn’t good for.
Second, I don’t just provide generic, overall information about the other tools on my list of the best. I explain what’s truly unique about each one:
Finally, I don’t talk down about any of the other tools on the list. Even in my description for TestBox’s biggest competitor, I still share the things that are really cool about how the tool works.
2. Help Scout’s best Kustomer alternatives blog post
Back when I was running growth at Help Scout, I needed to hire a new full-time writer to help scale our purchase intent SEO strategy.
After the initial set of interviews, I had three amazing candidates. Two had lots of experience in B2B SaaS and marketing and were going to be able to help with a much broader set of responsibilities than just writing blog posts.
The third had less marketing experience, but she had lots of experience working in customer support. She had used our competitors’ tools before. She knew what all the different features of a support tool were used for, and she knew what support agents cared about.
In the writing sample portion of the hiring process, she blew the other candidates out of the water. Her writing was incredibly detailed, specific, and empathetic.
It was clear that she knew what she was talking about, and it made the other candidates’ projects look like a local attraction guide written by someone who’d never visited the city.
Having someone who deeply understands your ICP and the competitive market allows you to do things like specify who each tool is best for, as shown in this guide to Kustomer alternatives:
To get to this level of helpfulness, you have to deeply understand what your ICP cares about. An easy way to achieve this is by hiring someone who’s already a subject-matter expert.
But you don’t necessarily have to start off as a subject-matter expert. I definitely wasn’t when it came to TestBox’s ICP and market. But I spent a ton of time at the beginning researching competitive tools, talking to people in the market, and listening to sales calls to get there.
3. Groove’s best help desk software blog post
If you want to see an example of providing everything a prospect might be looking for — and doing it without writing a novella — check out Groove’s post on the best help desk software.
Groove’s post is long, but it gives readers who don’t want to get into every detail a quick list right after the intro that lets them jump directly to what they’re most interested in.
For those who do want to get into all of the details, they’re all there, including this amazing feature comparison chart that must have taken someone weeks to research and put together:
I also love all of the little design touches in this post that make the information they’re presenting easier to consume and more delightful to look at:
4. Ahrefs’ unconventional Ahrefs vs. Semrush vs. Moz page
It was difficult to find a great example of a versus page that was truly written from a reader-first perspective. Versus pages are almost inevitably heavily biased toward the tools they’re selling. But Ahrefs does a great job with its Ahrefs vs. Semrush vs. Moz page.
What I love about this page is that it uses social proof and third-party data to make the case for why Ahrefs is better than its top competitors. First, it shows some polls where people voted Ahrefs as their top choice of SEO tools:
Then, it follows that up with third-party studies showing why it’s the better tool:
Finally, instead of listing every feature of all of the tools in a long, side-by-side feature checklist, the page lists the specific features Ahrefs has that its competitors don’t.
Great content will get you far… but maybe not far enough
If you’re a skeptical sort of person, you might have noticed that not all of the posts in my examples above rank in the number one position for their target keywords.
So am I full of it when it comes to telling you to focus on writing amazing content? Should you actually just spin up ChatGPT, crank out some nonsense, and build as many backlinks as it takes to get to the top spot?
No. At least, not if you want to earn and keep your top rankings.
The reality is that great content isn’t always enough. To get your content to rank, you have to do two things:
- Write content for readers.
- Optimize it for search.
While all of these posts do #1 really well, some of them aren’t executing well on #2.
But that’s a topic for next week, so if you’re interested in learning how to take the next step in writing purchase intent content that ranks, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter using the CTA below.
