Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7-Figures and Beyond ecommerce marketing podcast, host Greg Shuey explores the power of comparison content for eCommerce brands and explains why product vs. product, brand vs. brand, and category comparison content are among the highest-intent queries online and how they can directly influence purchase decisions. He emphasizes the importance of not letting third-party sites or forums control the narrative when buyers are ready to purchase. Instead, brands should own the conversation by creating honest, structured, and visually clear comparison pieces that answer buyer questions, build trust, and drive conversions. Greg also highlights how comparison content boosts visibility across Google SERPs, AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT, and social channels, while also reducing customer service friction and improving ROI. Ultimately, the choice is clear: either be compared or own the comparison.
Key Takeaways
- Comparison content equals high-intent traffic. Queries like “X vs. Y” signal purchase-ready customers; if you don’t provide answers, review sites or AI models will, which may not be in your best interest.
- Three types of comparison content matter most:
- Product vs. Product (helping customers choose within your own catalog)
- Brand vs. Brand (positioning honestly against competitors)
- Category Comparisons (educating buyers new to the product space)
- Structure and presentation are critical. Use side-by-side tables, pros and cons lists, schema markup, and “best for” sections to help both humans and AI platforms parse your content.
- Distribution extends beyond your blog. Publish on-site, seed to niche blogs, leverage affiliates, repurpose for YouTube/TikTok, and carefully share in forums like Reddit.
- Long-term impact is both top- and bottom-line. Comparison content bridges mid-to-bottom funnel, improves SEO and AI search visibility, and reduces customer service costs by proactively answering buyer questions.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- Am I currently letting third-party sites own the “X vs. Y” narrative for my products or competitors?
- Which of the three comparison content types (product, brand, category) would provide the quickest impact for my business right now?
- How can I structure comparison content with visuals, pros/cons, and schema to maximize both user clarity and search engine/AI visibility?
- Beyond my website, which off-site platforms (blogs, affiliates, YouTube, TikTok, forums) should I prioritize for distributing comparison content?
- Could comparison content help reduce customer service friction in my business by cutting down on returns, questions, or confusion?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.752)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Greg Shuey. I created this podcast to help D2C business owners and marketers who are stuck and trying to find a way to grow their businesses. So today we’re going to dive into comparison content. So your potential customers are out there asking you or begging you to help them choose the right.
product. So the question that I have is, are you answering their questions and resolving their concerns? Or are you letting a random review site or a Reddit thread answer it for you? Comparison content is massively underutilized in almost all industries and e-commerce is no different. Product versus product or X versus Y queries in Google.
in prompts, the LLMs, et cetera, are some of the highest intent queries that you can find online. These people are so far down the marketing funnel, and they are trying to make their purchase decision. And you have a huge opportunity to answer those questions, solve those problems, and really push them over the edge to make their purchase.
I think it’s also important to understand that the LLMs like chat GPT perplexity, Claude, Google Gemini, all of them, they don’t make up this comparison content. They pull it from online resources. So if that content doesn’t exist, they are going to hallucinate. they’re, they will make up things or they just won’t have any content to serve up. So you need to be that resource. So let’s jump in.
Let’s start talking about this more in detail about why this is so important, how to build it, how to structure it, and then how to get it out there online for Google and the LLMs to be able to crawl it, understand it, index it, and add it to their platforms.
Greg Shuey (02:12.098)
So why is comparison content a gold mine for e-commerce brands right now? As I mentioned before, product versus product, X versus Y search queries or LLM prompts, that pretty much equals purchase ready intent. These people, they have their credit cards out. I like to say that a lot. They have their credit cards out and they are ready to make a purchase. They’re ready to give their money to someone and that someone should be you. Comparison content shows up
across multiple channels and across multiple platforms. So if you go look at Google, any search engine results page, if you type in some kind of a keyword or a query, you’re typically going to see AI overviews. You are going to see people also ask and you are going to see other rich snippets or other features on the search engine results page that maybe you didn’t see a year ago or two years ago. That comes from this type of content.
Answers and LLMs like chat GPT. All of that comes from this type of content. You’ll also find it on YouTube, Reddit, Quora, also known as the cesspool of the internet. I hate Quora and niche review blogs or review sites. These pages drive visibility. They drive trust signals and they drive conversions as long as they help the user resolve.
any friction or help them make their purchase decision. Okay, so let’s talk about the different types of comparison content. You should be building these pieces for your own website. You should be building them for social platforms and then also seating them out to bloggers in your niche. We’re going to talk a little bit more about that here in just a few minutes. But for us, for our clients and for anyone who’s listening,
We typically have three different types of comparison content that we need to build and that we need to structure and that we need to optimize. Okay. So the very first type is product versus product comparison content. So this is where you take the time to compare different products that you offer. This is more of like an internal piece that you are using to help.
Greg Shuey (04:35.914)
nurture people who know about you and are trying to decide which product of yours they need to purchase for their specific use case. Okay. This type of content is best for brands that have multiple skews in the same category. So if you sell one or two different hero products and you don’t have a deep inventory and a you know, amount of different skews, like this may not
be the best strategy for you right now. The goal here is to help buyers choose between your product offerings. So a great example of this, and it’s not a good example by any means, is that I just bought a new Blackstone grill for our camping trips. We have a big one in our backyard, but I wanted a smaller one that we could then take out on little trips that we go. They have so many different models to choose from. They have some
with covers, they have some without covers, they have some that are great for portable uses, they have some that sit on a table, they have different, I don’t wanna say brands or product uses, like labels almost, different names of the products that they have in there. They didn’t have any good resources that helped me understand which would be best.
for my specific needs. They just listed out all their products. There wasn’t a lot to help me through that. Lucky for them, I mean, they pretty much own this market, but I was left frustrated and I spent way too much time researching, right? This is not the customer experience that you want to have for your potential customers. You want to make it easy. You want to make it fast for them to be able to consume this information and then make a purchase decision.
So that’s the first type. The second type is brand versus brand. So this is where you will build content to position yourself against a top competitor. We build content like this for a lot of our clients. There are some who will absolutely not let us build content like this. You’d actually be surprised at how many companies are like, Nope, I’m we’re not doing that, or I’m not going to let you do that.
Greg Shuey (06:56.194)
But at end of the day, this is an opportunity for you to do an honest review of your brand and their brand. Again, this is honesty, right? This is not a bash piece by any means. This allows you to be able to showcase what makes you unique, what makes them unique, how your business is different and so forth. And it’s important to, to like never go in attacking or bashing your competitors, highlight strengths, highlight weaknesses.
highlight trade-offs and make sure to do this honestly and tactfully. Another strategy is to do a roundup of all of the best companies in your industry for the given year. So an example of this might be the 10 best camping stoves for 2025. you can go through or camping stone brands, stove brands for 2025. And you can go through and you can talk about each one.
instead of just focusing on a one-to-one comparison. We recommend doing both types of contents, having like a roundup of all of your competitors and then doing head-to-head content comparisons as well. And then the last type of comparison content that we build for clients is to build category comparison content. This type of content has probably leveraged the least of the three.
but it helps searchers unfamiliar with the category go deeper. So this is more higher to mid funnel versus bottom of the funnel content. An example of this would be maybe like a bag company that we work with. They sell bags that are made in different materials. So they sell bags that are made out of canvas bags that are made out of leather. And we could create a piece that showcases the pros and the cons of canvas versus a leather duffel bag.
And it’s really a great way to be able to help potential customers start to understand what bag would work best for their unique needs and help them choose that right bag. Another thing that it does is it helps cut down on customer service tickets, live chats, as well as returns or exchanges. Yeah, this type of content can actually help you save money on the customer service side of the business. It’s insane. A lot of content marketing can help you save money.
Greg Shuey (09:18.462)
on the customer service side of the business. So you need to be thinking about that in terms of just traditional ROI that you’re going to get by driving more customers through your funnel. What else can it do to help your business? All right. So now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about structuring your content properly. So just writing up a blog post or words on a page, that’s not going to help you a whole lot.
You might get lucky. I’ve seen in the past where people just crank out content and they’ve ranked well in Google. And then over time they’ve lost those rankings and lost those rankings to the point where they’re just not ranking very well anymore. What used to work doesn’t work anymore. And what used to work is honestly just putting words on a page. So don’t do that at all. As you’re starting to work through the content, what you should be really thinking about is how to incorporate
side-by-side tables and other visual comparisons. Like these things really help like chunk up the content to where it’s like a paragraph of content, some bullet points of visual that is a lot more easy for a consumer to consume, but it’s also easier for any kind of tool, whether it be Google, whether it be the LLMs to send their crawlers through your website and be able to parse out that information and use it for their.
search results. Um, you know, the next thing is obviously going through like pros and cons, which we just talked about, uh, making sure to call out the key differences like weight, price, use cases, use cases is a huge one that we have been working on a lot for clients lately is like, here is exactly how you use this product and here is who this helps versus this product.
exactly how you use this and here’s how other customers use it and here’s who it’s for, etc. Those are humongous. And then the last one, which seemed to be really big, you know, about five or so years ago, maybe even a little bit longer than five or so years ago, is schema markup. Everyone in the SEO space talked about schema markup and how it was the next big thing from a search engine optimization perspective. You don’t hear a lot of people
Greg Shuey (11:38.511)
talking about it anymore. You don’t see him posting about it anymore on Twitter or on LinkedIn. It’s just not really a thing that people focus on. But from a content perspective and a structure perspective, it’s incredibly important. And in my opinion, since not a lot of people do this, it’s kind of a really big competitive advantage for those who actually take the time to go through and use that because that’s special markup.
will tell Google it will tell the LLMs exactly what you mean by your piece of content and it will help them better understand and display your data. So if you’re unfamiliar with schema, I would just go do a Google search for schema markup and then you can even, you know, tie it directly to your industry that you work in. And I can’t remember if it’s like schema.org. I can’t remember what the exact URL is.
But go there, look at all the different schemas that might be relevant for your e-commerce brand, for the content that you’re producing, and get a handle on that and figure out how to start wrapping your content in those different schemas so that you can send those signals over to those crawlers as they come through your website. One pro tip here that I love to share with people, one of my favorite things to include these days is a section called, Who is this Best for?
Don’t pretend that every single one of your products is the perfect product for everyone. Like it’s not. It works perfect for your ideal customer profile. And typically that is about it. It may work good for more people outside of your ideal customer profile, but it’s not going to work for every single human on the face of this planet. It’s going to work through work well for specific people with specific problems at that point in time. So make sure to highlight that.
Also, honesty always wins, especially if you think someone else’s product is a better fit. Honesty will win in business all the time. Okay. We’re no stranger to that here at Stride. One of the things that I say when I’m talking to new potential clients is, you know, when we offer them an account analysis and a strategy build, one of the things I say is I may come back and say that we’re not a good fit and that someone else would be a better fit for you because it is true.
Greg Shuey (13:56.609)
And that honesty really resonates with those people that I talked to, and it’s going to resonate really well with your potential customers as well. And so make sure that you’re honest in everything that you do, especially when building out these comparison pieces. Okay. So now that we’ve kind of walked through like what we need to create in terms of types of comparison content, what we need to do in terms of structuring that content so that it will actually have a chance to rank well in Google.
Rank well in the LLMs like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, all of those. Let’s talk about where this content should live because that’s really the last piece of this. If you think about like a stool, a three-legged stool, those are the three legs. And if you don’t have one of those legs, it’s not gonna work well for you and your business, okay? So hopefully now you’ve got that pretty good grasp of the first two legs. So let’s talk about where it should live.
So it can live one of two places. It can either live on your website or it can live on a third party website. We’ll talk about third party websites here in just a minute. So if you’re going to publish this on your website, the most common place to put it is typically going to be your blog. Blogs are absolutely ideal from a search engine optimization perspective because it’s incredibly easy to structure and it’s incredibly easy to update.
especially if you’re a brand that has code freezes throughout the year, which a lot of brands do, especially those that are built on custom platforms. They have code freezes where no one can get in and make changes to their product pages, their category pages, their homepage. Oftentimes the blog, it is not included in those code freezes. And so you still have the opportunity to continue to develop content, expand content, refine content and so forth. And you’re going to need to do that.
Google updates their algorithm every day, sometimes multiple times a day. And sometimes you’re going to be caught in the crosshairs of that algorithm update. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you are penalized, but what it means is that they’ve changed the way that they look at content. They’ve changed the way that they rank content or that they give preference to certain types of structured content. And you’re going to have to go back in and refresh a content piece from time to time.
Greg Shuey (16:25.602)
We’ve got one client right now that, you know, we’re seeing some fluctuation, in Google in the SERP features and AI overviews. People also ask some pretty wild fluctuation actually. So we, we wrote a really amazing piece for them about two or three years ago, a compare and contrast piece about different product types. and then it, it ranked really well and it grew really well with SERP features in June.
you know, we came back in and we did a refresh and continued to grow that particular blog post. Just this past week, that’s where we started to see the fluctuations. And so we’re coming back in and doing another post refresh based on competitive research, figuring out what Google’s giving preference to now. And so you may need to refresh that piece over and over and over again over time. So the blog is one of the best places to put that content. Okay.
You can also put this type of information, this comparison content on your landing pages, your category pages, your product description pages. You can also include it in your frequently asked questions sections. Just make sure wherever you put this content that it makes sense in terms of context to everything else is on that page. You don’t wanna say, I’m just gonna stick it here.
because I get a lot of traffic on this web page. If it doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t flow, you are going to create friction and you’re going to make it more difficult for your ideal customer to be able to make a purchase decision and buy from you. Remember credit card out, ready to go. We want to make it easy. Okay. So that’s the first place where you can put this type of content. The second place that you can put this kind of content is on third party websites.
also referred to as off-site content. Probably the most popular place to put this kind of content is on third-party blogs. So going out, collaborating, doing outreach to work with bloggers, to work with affiliates, to produce this content on your behalf, they will take that and they will actually do the research and build the piece and post it on their website.
Greg Shuey (18:41.384)
Sometimes they’ll even let you co-create it to where you collaborate together. Those are really amazing pieces that you’re able to get placed. Sometimes they will actually let you create it for them. Some bloggers will just say, you know, write it up, send it over to me. I’ll polish it up. I’ll, you know, add in my tone and voice and then we’re ready to rip. Right? The bonus of working with these types of bloggers and collaborators is that this type of placement will also help your
traditional search engine optimization, helping you rank better in Google for traditional keyword searches by getting strong backlinks coming back into your website, whether those be the blog posts, the helpful content, the comparison content back into those, back into your category pages, back into your product pages, and oftentimes back even into your homepage. Other places that this content should live is YouTube and TikTok.
Take this content that you’re building for your website and repurpose it. Use it to create short form video that you can push out on YouTube and TikTok. You should also consider seeding it to different forums, seeding it to Reddit, as long as you do it tactfully and not promotionally. I I’ve talked about this. I feel at nauseam that these sites can sniff out a…
I don’t want to say a fraud, but sniff out a promotional bugger, right? And they’re going to delete your content. They’re going to block you. So get in there and be helpful. And then when the opportunity presents itself, see that content to these different communities. And I’m sure that you can also find other niche communities where this type of content will just absolutely crush for your brand. You just have to put in the time and the effort to uncover those, build the presence, and then have the opportunity to be able to.
push that content. Okay. All right. That was a lot. as we start to wrap this up, I just like to touch on a couple of things. I know we’re kind of a shorter podcast today and that’s okay. It was a very easy topic to understand. Most brands I talk with, whether it’s my clients, whether it’s a prospective clients, they absolutely obsess with top of funnel content, top of funnel blog content.
Greg Shuey (21:05.102)
top of funnel meta ad content, top of funnel Pinterest content, whatever. This isn’t necessarily bad. It’s not necessarily the wrong way to go about it. But as you think about comparison content, that type of content helps bridge the gap from top of funnel to bottom of funnel. Because as I mentioned before, this is where buying decisions are happening. Not after viewing your latest video on Facebook.
They are happening by digging into this comparison type content. In order to scale your business, in order to drive new customer acquisition, in order to drive repeat purchases and customer lifetime value, you have to have both as a brand. So please remember that if you’re wanting to start showing up in each of these platforms,
If you’re wanting to start showing up more in Google search features like AI overviews, people also ask if you’re wanting to show up in AI search, you need this content. And if you don’t have it, you’re going to be invisible. Okay. chat GPT searches are growing. They’re growing month over month, not at a massive rate by any means, but they’re growing. And I promise you that you’re going to want to be in there for right now for capturing.
demand right now, but to also be positioned so that you can capture demand as that demand continues to grow in platform. Okay. So my final words, as we wrap this up is that you can either be the brand that people compare or you can be the brand that owns the comparison and that owns the narrative. Do not leave this to chance. You want to be the ladder, the brand that owns the comparison.
and the brand that owns the narrative. So carve out some time this week, take some time, start to look through the Google SERPs, start to look through ChatGPT, put your customer hat on, not your marketer hat, put your customer hat on and start typing in those things and seeing what shows up, seeing what the responses are when you type in those different queries or prompts so that you can start to reverse engineer what you need on your website.
Greg Shuey (23:20.162)
And then take some time to start building out those pieces, building out those comparison pieces, shoot for one or two a month. You don’t have to do them all this month. You don’t have to do them all next month. Take time, build a piece here or there, get up early one morning and build that piece, get it published, get it promoted and watch this help kind of skyrocket your brand, help it improve your conversion rates and help you build sustainable growth.
So I hope that this episode was helpful and insightful for you and that you’re able to find two to three golden nuggets that you can take and start implementing today. Thank you so much for taking a few minutes and sharing a few minutes of your day with me. And I hope that you can tune in again next time. Take care.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.