Let’s face it.
It’s not an easy job to create high-quality product comparison posts.
It’s not easy at all.
You need to use the product inside out, and analyze it with other products in the space and write down!
It takes a lot of time, right?
But it’s worth it as the payoffs can be huge!
If you ask me for a company that’s making good use of product comparison posts for stealing the prospects of their competitors, it is Thrive Themes.

With these posts, the Thrive Themes is ranking for almost all the product comparison posts in its niche. Whenever a person Googles to check whether to buy Thrive product or others, they are likely to land on the above pages by Thrive Themes themselves.
Implementing the same strategy in case of affiliate products also works like a charm. If you are comparing two are more products, you’ll get paid even any one of the products is purchased through your link.
In one of my previous blog posts, I explained how to write product reviews. In this post, I’ll explain to you how to write winning product comparison posts.
SECTION 1
What products to compare?

Find products to compare via keyword research

It’s no secret that organic traffic is the most targeted traffic you can ever get. The product comparison keywords have a “vs” word in it.
The presence of words like:
- vs
- versus
- or
- comparison
- compare
These words signal the presence of comparison intent in the keyword.
The keywords can be found just by entering the “product vs” in the search bar and get search suggestions. On the other hand, you can also use UberSuggest to brainstorm the keywords.

For example, I noticed that Grammarly and Whitesmoke have an affiliate program. So I searched for it on Google.

To target more related keywords, I also added one additional competitor called “Ginger”. As I’ve used all of these products, I researched the keywords and wrote the comparison post on the same.
If you wonder how I’m getting the search volume and other data underneath the search bar, thanks to KeywordsEverywhere Extension. It integrates with every major keyword tool and with SERPs.
You can also make use of Google suggest tools. Just enter your seed keyword, and it’ll return all the comparison post keyword ideas.

These are all the products that are considered to be competitors of the product (Grammarly in this case), and people are looking for comparison posts. Now I need to just analyze the organic competitiveness of these keywords and hopefully target them in my blog posts.
Research product alternatives
Research the alternatives of the product you have in mind for comparison.

With a simple Google search, I came across these products are the competitors and alternatives. You can also head over to crowdsourced product roundup sites like
It’ll return you all the products pertaining to the keyword and their competitor products giving you great ideas for your product comparison post.
SECTION 2
How to write product comparison posts?

Write the post understanding the target audience

Before writing a comparison post, you need to define the audience who would like to read your comparison post.
What will be the questions that they may have? What problems they may be facing? What information they may be seeking in your blog post? Without knowing the psychographics of your readers, you will have a hard time to convert your readers into customers.

For any prospect, there are 5 stages:
- Problem identification: First they’ll become aware that they have a problem and decide to solve their problem.
- Product research: In this stage, they’ll look for the solutions and products that can easily and quickly solve their problem.
- Product comparison: Once they come up with a product, they’ll compare it with other similar products and their competitors to get the best value for the money or time they spend.
- Purchase: They finally make the purchase of the product based on their research.
- Post-purchase: In this stage they’ve completed the purchase and perhaps have
useed the product.
As you can from reading the above, even before reading your comparison posts, most of the times they would already have a well-researched product in mind.
There may also be people who already have product A, and is thinking of buying the product B too. However the chances are less.
Keeping this in mind helps a lot of to write highly converting reviews.
Craft a spellbinding comparison title
A great title is essential for a blog post to get noticed in the crowd. I’ve emphasized this again and again in my previous blog posts.
If you take a look at my blog title screenshot below, you may have noticed that the title of the blog post is attractive. The title is the main reason, why this post is ranking on top.

Added to that, I’m comparing 3 similar products in one blog post. This has also contributed to the boost of CTR in SERPs. As it’ll be a kind of review post, you can also consider including schema star rating in the blog post.
Before writing any blog post, I prepare a list of 7 good headlines that would be suitable. I will pick the best one among them and try to come up with better versions of that headline by mixing and matching the words for maximum impact.
I do this because I know the importance of headline writing for SEO and I realized this lately.
Two types of content formats for comparisons

When writing product comparison posts, you can compare the products by using either one of these two content strategies.
- Product-centric comparison
- Aspect-centric comparison (I prefer this)
In

In this blog post, I’ve reviewed the individual products one-by-one. After that, I’ve picked up the winner and presented the reason for picking the winner clearly. Analyze the above blog post carefully.
In case of aspect-centric format, instead of reviewing the products one below the other, you review how the two/three products satisfy a need or how they perform in some areas. You’re not gonna review the products one-by-one.

For example, if you are comparing two or more web hosting solutions, you’re going to compare the aspects of web hosting solutions like speed, support, features, and pricing, etc. You also present the reason why one product excels over the other in each of the areas.
Here’s the example for feature-centric comparison: GeneratePress vs Astra – Let’s Settle This!
Before writing a comparison post, you need to decide which of these formats would suit your target audience and topic.
I prefer to write my comparison posts in aspect-centric format any day, especially if I’m comparing 2 or more products as it is easily digestible by the reader.
Strategies for writing effective product comparisons

Coming up with a detailed outline is very essential before writing a blog post. Without having an outline, you’ll be severely limiting how awesome your blog post could be.
For writing post outlines, make use of tools like
In this blog post, I’ll not go in-depth regarding all the things you need to include in a blog post outline. I’ve covered this section fairly in-depth in my previous blog post.
Here are some of the things to include in comparison post outline:
- What are all the
product aspects you need to include in the comparison? For example, if you are comparing two hosting products – then you may compare speed, uptime, SSL, WordPress, security, backups, support, pricing, and much more. - How the products you are comparing performs in each of the fields.
- Convert the features of the products to benefits
- Convert features and benefits to small use cases and paint the picture of what’s possible.
- Mention the USPs and similarities of each of the product you’re reviewing and perhaps categorize them.
- Collect the product photos or screenshots and put them in right buckets inside your outline.
- Write the initial list of pros and cons.
Once you have the outline ready, you’re ready to fill in the details.
By the time you’ve finished writing the headline and the outline, writing the intro will be a piece of cake for you.
In the intro, you need to build rapport. Your readers need to feel that you are similar to them, and you honestly know the answer to their problem.
What to include in the intro?

You can restate the intention of them visiting your blog post, describe a common problem your readers may be facing when deciding about the products you’re comparing, etc. You need to do this with a friendly and humanistic tone.
You need to write the introduction of your blog post, considering the audience you are writing for. When the visitors land on your page persuaded by the catchy blog title, the first thing they read is the introduction.
If the introduction won’t promise the reader authentically that the post would solve their problem, readers won’t bother reading further. Let’s forget about converting them. They’ll fly.
You can read more about blog intro writing here.
After the intro, the actual comparison starts.
- You need to start filling in the details for your outline on how the products perform when it comes to the aspects.
- Decide the winning product in each of the aspects/feature categories (more on this later).
- You need to refer the list of product USPs you prepared in the outline phase, and map those USPs to benefits and pain the possibilities. USPs give people clarity in a product comparison post and almost all the times it satisfies their search objective.
- Write down the similarities of the product.
- Don’t hesitate to also compare the products with other products that are not in the title of the blog post at times
- If a product is costly, help readers decide whether for them the extra features worth the money.
The comparison posts typically are very long, say 2000+ words.
You can also make use of inoculation theory as outlined by Drew Eric Whitman in his famous book Cashvertising to strengthen your audience belief about your product/service and prefer you for rest of their life.
Inoculation theory is used to reinforce a consumer’s existing attitudes toward a product or service by presenting a “weak” argument that tricks the consumer into defending his position and therefore strengthening his attitude. The three steps
Drew Eric Whitman in his book Cashvertisingare: 1. Warn of an impending attack. 2. Make a weak attack. 3. Encourage a strong defense.

When you present your own product’s flaws, people likely trust you. Added to this, it makes the competitor’s criticism irrelevant. When your competitors describe your flaws to your prospects in the future, they’ll remember that you already explained about them earlier.
If you’ve watched the movie 8 Mile starring Eminem, you can now easily analyze how Eminem won the final rap battle using a mild form of inoculation theory – wherein he rapped all the possible allegations that the other rapper would make, leaving the other rapper speechless in his turn.
What if there are more than 2 products to compare?
In some cases, you may want to compare more than three products in your blog post. In those cases, it’ll be great for you to include a comparison table with the features of the product and also go with a

(Source)
You can make use of plugins like TablePress or the Thrive Architect to create this type of product comparison posts.
Make sure you also include a call to action button below each of the product column in the table. This increases the conversion rate in your blog post by closing highly-motivated buyers.
In the comparison table you need to include the features that help people to narrow down their choices according to their needs.
Presenting a comparison table makes your readers comfortably make a buying decision and likely conversions increase.
You can even consider creating multiple comparison tables for each of the sections/aspects in your comparison posts (rather than a single large table). By this, you’ll not miss including any single feature in your product comparison table.
Added to that, this kind of data-rich tables also increases the chances of your blog post getting featured in Google Knowledge Graph.
Deciding the winning product

Your comparison post should also determine the clear winner among the products you are reviewing (if there is any).
If there are no absolute winners, you need to mention the winners that excel in some of the key areas and tie up the final winner.
You need to remember that you need to be an unbiased reviewer. If readers find that you are biased towards a product it destroys trust especially in case of product comparisons. When you make any claims, don’t sound blatant, include a reason or proof for your claim.
Each of the products you’re reviewing (even the overall losers) may have their own strengths, and would be the winners in some aspects – do mention them. If the benefits of a product outweigh the downsides, let people buy them.
After deciding the winner, don’t forget to include the call to action button for both/all of the products you’re reviewing.
How to format your comparison posts effectively?

Comparison posts if they contain lots of text can be overwhelming, and users likely click away.
You need to take extreme care of organizing and also properly formatting your comparison post to make sure that readers will be able to connect the dots and will not be lost.
The effectiveness of organization and formatting boils down to you create a detailed outline for your comparison post before penning down the actual post.
However, below are the some of tips for you to format your comparison post effectively.
- Include a table for comparison with key feature differences that matters the most.
- Include lots of bullet points like USPs, similarities, pros, cons, use-cases, etc.
- Add colored content boxes to make the important text standout.
- Make use of bold and italics properly in your post.
- Add lots of images and screenshots, as potential customers prefer visual content in case of product comparisons.
- Make sure you include some USPs of the product right in the comparison table
- Add a table of content or jump-to section at the beginning of the article as that it’ll be useful for readers to scan and also enriches your search result in Google.
- Include the bottom line for each section where you covered the aspects.
- At the end of the comparison post, have a verdict section where you summarize your comparison, and announce the winner/winners in their specific areas and conclude with the call to actions.
While writing product comparisons, I also advise you to have the comparisons divided into two or three columns so that users find it easy to contrast the features.

With this, users will find it easy to compare the features of the product side-by-side.
If you’re not a big fan of making the entire comparison post as two columns, you can include columns every now and then inside the sections that describe the features.

In the WordPress block editor, you can just create a column element, add content inside it. Looking for more advanced blocks? Then consider using some good Gutenberg plugins.
If you are using any WordPress WYSIWYG page builders, the column element will be built in it.
Where to include CTA buttons in comparison posts?

Include the call to action buttons at strategic positions of your content analyzing the psychological ‘flow’ phenomenon, so that audience converts greatly. People likely click when they are out of the “flow” (reading the blog post deeply), or when an emotional trigger is present in the CTA (mainly curiosity).
Here are some places you need to include CTA buttons and links where people likely click.
Here are some places you need to include CTA buttons and links where people likely click.
- In the introduction
- Inside the comparison tables
- Right under the pros and cons box
- Right under the embedded video (if any)
- In the verdict sections
- After explaining each of the aspects/sections
- Other places where users likely click
You can also consider linking to some of the internal pages of the product’s website (maybe some how-to or information pages) that users likely click on with informational intent
In most of the affiliate portals, you can create your own custom affiliate links to the internal pages of the affiliate product’s website.
For example, some Digital Marketing products encourage their affiliates to link to their webinar pages with informational intent.
Final words
Once you start keyword research for some of the product comparison keywords, you can easily find some of the high volume keywords that you can create a blog post on.
Before writing this kind of post, make sure you prepare an outline of the post and also determine the aspects that you need to cover in your blog post.
Make the content genuinely useful for the readers by covering all the aspects.
Hope you found the post helpful.