# Ship five bottom of funnel pages

> Write and ship five bottom of funnel pages this week: the exact template, the proof blocks, CTA placement and the internal links that get them crawled fast.

Source: https://saas-marketing.net/courses/saas-seo-sprint/02-bofu-pages/
Topic: SaaS SEO
Type: course-lesson
Published: 2026-09-11
Last updated: 2026-09-11
Publisher: SaaS Marketing (saas-marketing.net)
License: CC BY 4.0. Quote or republish with attribution and a link to https://saas-marketing.net/courses/saas-seo-sprint/02-bofu-pages/

## Short answer

Ship five bottom of funnel pages in this order: one 'best X software' category page, two '[competitor] alternatives' pages, one 'you vs competitor' page, and one integration or use case page. Each needs a 40 to 70 word answer capsule near the top, a feature comparison table with dated and sourced claims, two G2 or Capterra corroborations, one product screenshot, a mid page CTA, and three internal links in and two out before you submit it for indexing.

## Key takeaways

- Five pages beat fifty. Category, two alternatives, one vs, one integration page covers the highest intent queries in your market.
- Every competitor claim needs a source URL and a checked-on date, because pricing and features change and stale claims get you takedown emails.
- Publish at 80 percent polish. These pages get revised quarterly regardless, so waiting for perfect costs you a quarter of ranking data.
- Put the answer capsule above the comparison table so answer engines can extract a clean 50 word verdict without parsing markup.
- A page with zero internal links pointing at it will sit uncrawled for weeks. Link from the homepage or a top nav hub at publish.
- Comparison and alternatives pages typically convert organic visitors to trial at several times the rate of top of funnel blog posts.

---

You built a keyword map last lesson. This week you turn the bottom five rows of it into live URLs. Five pages, five days, one submitted sitemap. That is the whole assignment, and the hard part is not the writing.

The hard part is that most people spend three weeks polishing a single vs page instead of shipping five and letting the search results tell them which one had legs. Bottom of funnel pages are living documents. You will rewrite every one of them within six months because a competitor changed their pricing page. So ship at 80 percent.

## Which five pages, and in what order

Write them in this sequence: one best-of category page, two competitor alternatives pages, one head to head vs page, one integration or use case page. This order front loads the pages that need the least competitor research and gives you a template to reuse by day three.

The category page ("best [category] software for [qualifier]") is first because you control every claim on it and it becomes the internal link hub for the other four. Alternatives pages come second because they are formulaic once you have the research pattern. The vs page is fourth because it demands the most defensible claims about a named rival. The integration or use case page is last because it is the easiest to write and you will be tired.

| Page | Query pattern | Word target | Typical monthly volume | Why it earns its slot |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Best-of category | best [category] software 2026 | 1,400 to 2,000 | 200 to 3,000 | Highest volume in your BOFU set, hub for internal links |
| Alternatives A | [big competitor] alternatives | 1,100 to 1,500 | 100 to 1,500 | Buyers actively leaving a named product |
| Alternatives B | [adjacent competitor] alternatives | 1,100 to 1,500 | 40 to 400 | Less contested, often ranks in under 8 weeks |
| Head to head | [you] vs [competitor] | 900 to 1,400 | 20 to 300 | Sales sends this link, so it earns its keep offline |
| Integration or use case | [product] [integration] integration | 700 to 1,100 | 10 to 200 | Template for a future programmatic set |

If your category has no meaningful search volume yet, swap the best-of page for a second use case page and read the demand estimation method in [bottom of funnel keyword patterns](/guides/bofu-keyword-patterns/) before you commit a week to a page nobody queries.

## The template every one of these pages uses

All five pages share the same skeleton, and the skeleton is what makes day four take two hours instead of two days. Build it once in your CMS as a duplicable draft.

**The five block BOFU page skeleton**

The answer capsule deserves more attention than the rest combined. It is the block that gets lifted into an AI Overview or a ChatGPT answer, and it is the block a skimming buyer reads. Write it last, after you know what the page actually argues, then move it to the top.

A capsule that works looks like this: "Linear suits engineering teams that want opinionated workflow and speed. Asana suits cross-functional teams that need project views non-engineers understand. If your roadmap lives with product managers and designers as much as engineers, Asana wins on adoption. If your team is under 40 people and ships weekly, Linear wins on velocity."

Notice it takes a side twice and names who should pick the other option. That is the shape.

The most common failure on a vs page is the both-are-great ending. "It depends on your needs" tells the reader nothing and gives an answer engine nothing to quote. Pick a default recommendation for a named segment. You can be wrong for some readers. You cannot be useless for all of them.

## The proof elements that keep the page defensible

Every claim about a competitor needs a source URL and a date you checked it. Put the date in the table caption: "Competitor features verified 4 September 2026 against public documentation." This takes one line and it is the difference between a page you can defend and a page that generates an unpleasant email from a competitor's legal team.

Three proof types carry the page:

- **Sourced feature claims.** Link to the competitor's own docs or pricing page, not to a third party roundup. Third party roundups go stale and you inherit their errors.
- **Review corroboration.** Pull two quotes from G2 or Capterra review text that support the pattern you are describing, with dates. A buyer trusts a dated review more than your prose.
- **A real screenshot.** One image of the actual workflow, taken from your product at current UI state. Stock illustrations of dashboards convince nobody and add page weight.

Do not screenshot the competitor's product unless you are confident about their terms of use, and never reproduce their UI in a way that implies endorsement. Describing their flow in words carries almost the same persuasive weight with none of the exposure. The full argument for how far you can go lives in [SaaS alternatives pages](/guides/saas-alternatives-pages/).

**90 days** Maximum acceptable age of a competitor pricing claim before it needs re-verification

## Where the CTA goes and what it says

Two inline CTAs, one after the verdict section and one immediately after the comparison table. That second placement matters: the reader has just finished processing a decision grid and is at peak intent. A third closing CTA is optional and usually adds little.

The copy should match the page's funnel position. A vs page CTA saying "Learn more about our platform" wastes the intent. Try "Start a 14 day trial, no card" or "See the migration guide from [competitor]" instead. On the alternatives pages specifically, a migration-flavoured CTA outperforms a generic trial button in most tests I have seen, because the reader's actual job is switching, not evaluating from zero.

Skip the exit intent popup on BOFU pages. These readers are close to a decision and the interruption costs more in trust than it gains in emails. Save popups for blog posts.

## The internal links that get these pages crawled

A new page with zero internal links pointing at it can sit undiscovered for weeks, and on a small site Google may crawl it once and not return. Before you submit anything to Search Console, each of the five pages needs three inbound internal links and two outbound.

Here is the linking contract for this sprint:

| Page | Links in from | Links out to |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Best-of category | Homepage, pricing page, top nav or footer | Both alternatives pages, the vs page |
| Alternatives A | Best-of page, vs page, one blog post | Best-of page, pricing page |
| Alternatives B | Best-of page, Alternatives A, one blog post | Best-of page, integration page |
| Vs page | Best-of page, pricing page, one blog post | Alternatives A, pricing page |
| Integration page | Best-of page, docs or changelog, one blog post | Pricing page, relevant use case |

The homepage or a hub in the main navigation matters most. Links buried in a footer get crawled but pass thinner signals. If your site already has a resources hub, add the five pages there on publish day, not later. The mechanics of doing this at scale are covered in [bottom of funnel SEO for SaaS](/guides/bottom-of-funnel-seo-saas/), and the broader link architecture question sits inside the [SaaS SEO](/saas-seo/) overview.

Send the five URLs to your account executives the day they go live, with one line on when to use each. A vs page that gets sent in 30 sales emails a month accrues engagement signals and gets feedback you would otherwise wait a quarter for. It also tells you fast if the verdict section is wrong, because a prospect will argue with it.

## What this actually costs in hours

Budget 14 to 20 hours total for the five pages if you know your market. That breaks down as roughly four hours for the category page, two and a half each for the alternatives pages, three for the vs page (competitor research is the expensive part), and 90 minutes for the integration page. Add three hours for screenshots, tables and internal linking.

If you are hiring this out, a competent freelance SaaS writer will quote somewhere between $400 and $900 per BOFU page in 2026, and you should expect to spend two hours per page briefing and editing regardless. The research quality on competitor claims is the thing that separates a $400 page from a $900 one. Hand them the [SaaS comparison page template](/templates/saas-comparison-page-template/) and your positioning doc and the gap narrows considerably.

The honest tradeoff: these pages are maintenance debt. Five BOFU pages means five quarterly reviews forever. At twenty pages you need a calendar reminder and an owner. At fifty you need a spreadsheet with last-verified dates and a rotation, or the claims rot and you start losing trust in exactly the pages that convert best.

## Publishing at 80 percent, and what 80 percent means

Eighty percent means the facts are right, the verdict is clear, the table is complete and sourced, and the internal links exist. It does not mean the intro is elegant or that you found a custom illustration. Ship it.

The reason is mechanical. You cannot know which of the five pages deserves investment until you have eight weeks of impression data in Search Console. One of them will surprise you: usually the smaller competitor's alternatives page, which ranks in a month because the incumbent page is a 2023 listicle nobody has touched. Another will do nothing for six months. Polishing all five equally before publish spends your effort uniformly across pages that will not perform uniformly.

Set a calendar block for eight weeks out. At that point, look at impressions and average position per page, then rewrite the top two properly and leave the others. That is the loop the [90 day SaaS SEO plan](/playbooks/saas-seo-90-day-plan/) runs on.

Two things must be right at publish: factual claims about competitors, and pricing numbers. Everything else can be rough. A wrong feature claim on a vs page is the one error that generates legal correspondence and gets you a permanent reputation among that competitor's team. Verify twice, date the verification, move on.

## What good looks like after eight weeks

Concrete signals, in priority order. All five URLs indexed and showing impressions in Search Console. At least two pages with an average position inside the top 20 for their target query. At least one trial signup you can trace to a BOFU page. Sales using the vs page link without being reminded.

If none of the five are indexed after eight weeks, the problem is not your writing, and lesson three is where you fix it. If they are indexed but flat at position 40 with no movement, the problem is authority, and lesson four is where that starts. If you are running this at seed stage with no domain history, calibrate expectations against [seed stage SaaS SEO](/playbooks/seed-stage-saas-seo/) rather than against a competitor with a six year old domain.

Teams that skip the integration page and write a sixth alternatives page instead usually regret it within a quarter. The integration page is your test template for a programmatic set later, and building one by hand teaches you what the template needs. There is more on that pattern in [SaaS integration pages](/guides/saas-integration-pages-seo/).

## Do this before the next lesson

Publish all five URLs. Submit them in Search Console individually via URL Inspection, not just via the sitemap, because individual submission is faster on small sites. Then record the publish date, target query and current position for each in the tracker you started in [lesson one](/courses/saas-seo-sprint/01-keyword-map/).

If any page is not indexed within seven days, do not rewrite it. Something structural is blocking it, and lesson three covers the six checks that find it. Bring your list of unindexed URLs with you. For the wider argument on why these page types deserve your first month rather than a blog series, read [bottom of funnel content for SaaS](/guides/bottom-of-funnel-content/).

## Frequently asked questions

### How do you write a SaaS comparison page that ranks?

Lead with a 50 word verdict that names both products and says who should pick which. Follow with a feature table where every competitor cell carries a source link and a checked-on date. Add a pricing section, two honest limitations of your own product, and a screenshot of the workflow you claim is better. Then link to it from three existing pages.

### Are alternatives pages worth building for SaaS?

Yes, when a competitor has meaningful brand search. '[Competitor] alternatives' queries come from buyers already in an evaluation, so intent is high and volume is low. The tradeoff is that these pages need quarterly maintenance because competitor pricing and features move, and a stale page damages trust faster than no page at all.

### How long should a bottom of funnel page be?

Between 900 and 1,600 words for a vs or alternatives page, and 1,200 to 2,000 for a best-of category listicle. Length follows the comparison surface you need to cover. Padding a vs page to 3,000 words to match a competitor is a common mistake that buries the decision the reader came for.

### Should you include competitors you lose to on your own comparison pages?

Yes. Naming one segment where the competitor is the better pick is the single strongest trust signal on the page, and it is also what answer engines quote. If your page claims you win on every dimension, buyers discount everything else you wrote and move to G2.

### How many CTAs should a bottom of funnel page have?

Two or three. One inline after the verdict section, one after the comparison table, and optionally a closing block. A sticky bar plus five inline buttons reads as desperate and measurably hurts time on page. The CTA after the comparison table usually carries the highest click rate because the reader has just made a decision.

### How fast do bottom of funnel pages start ranking?

On a domain with some existing authority, expect movement in four to eight weeks and a settled position by month three to five. On a brand new domain, plan for six months or more. Alternatives pages for smaller competitors often rank fastest because the competing pages are thin and rarely refreshed.

### Do I need schema markup on comparison pages?

FAQPage schema on the questions block and Product or SoftwareApplication schema on the reviewed items are worth adding, and they take about twenty minutes. Do not expect rich results from comparison content. The practical benefit is cleaner extraction by answer engines that parse structured data before prose.