Many companies shy away from targeting online searches for ‘best (product)’ because they feel it’s not really appropriate in their market.
“There’s no ‘best blue widget'”, they say, and go on to give a quite reasonable explanation about the different applications of different manufacturers’ products, or the difficulty of comparing them.
Unfortunately I’ve got news for these companies. It’s not about what they think. It’s about what customers do. And customers search for ‘best blue widget’, regardless of the inappropriateness of what they’re doing.
Which means we all need to be there, ready for that search.
So let’s tackle the issue. Firstly, we need to do a search for ‘best (product)’ in our market, and find out what we’re up against. Increasingly, it’s likely there will be direct results, but the pages which are ranking are on low-quality sites built around fairly unhelpful lists. These can be beaten.
Now we need to think about what can be done to create some appropriate content to rank for ‘best blue widget’. Remember, the fact that our site is already associated with blue widgets is a big advantage.
We’re not going to be listing all of our competitors’ products, obviously. But what about an article called ‘the best blue widget technologies in 2022’, explaining what’s behind our products and why it’s an improvement over other approaches? There’s no reason why the article can’t talk about competing technologies and their disadvantages – links to non-commercial sites giving more background on those will be an SEO benefit.
An article called ‘the best blue widgets’ doesn’t have to list competitors. If we think creatively, a ‘what to look for’ article can do the job very nicely, and keep its readers satisfied.