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SaaS Alternatives Keywords - The Complete List

The easiest way to sell a product (SaaS or otherwise) is to someone who already wants to buy a product.

It’s even better if they don’t want to buy an existing solution, as you can present yours as the solution.

When it comes to SEO, this translates to “[Brand] alternative” searches (e.g. “Semrush alternative”).

If you’re a founder, seeing these searches validates demand for another product, and if you’re a marketer for an existing product, it can be a great growth channel. If you want my full thoughts on how to use these search terms effectively, you can read them at the bottom of this page.

A List of Saas Alternatives Search Terms

Since these keywords are so useful, I wanted to come up with a BIG list of them, for SaaS in particular.

So I took all the brand names from our SaaS Trends Database, stuck “alternative” onto the end of them, and grabbed the search volume (note that “alternative” as a suffix is the most common variation of this type of term compared to “alternative to X”).

It turns out that 90% or so of companies don’t have a significant search volume for this type of term, but that still leaves us with about 2,000 terms.

You can either view them in the table below, or make your own copy of this Google Sheet.

Notes: The volume refers to the English search volume for the term in June 2024, and the description for each row describes the main product that people want an alternative to. So if you want to specifically focus on a type of tool, you can search for a relevant term.

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How to Present Your Product as an Alternative

These keywords are especially useful in saturated (or just competitive) niches. I’ve seen multiple SaaS businesses bootstrap to well over $10k MRR just by focusing on this type of strategy.

So let me give you a high-level breakdown of how to maximize these types of keywords.

1. Find Out Why Users Are Looking for an Alternative

People can want alternatives for all sorts of reasons. You need to find the ones that you can actually fulfill on your end.

Start by researching the most common reasons and complaints people have about the particular software they want an alternative to. You can find these:

You can even just throw all that into ChatGPT and get a summary.

2. Tailor Your Landing Page Around the Most Common Complaints

This will usually be your homepage, but it doesn’t have to be.

Try to use the language you found in the previous step as much as possible.

Typically the main reasons that you will find and want to focus on revolve around:

3. Getting In Front of People Who Want an Alternative

While it’s good to position your product and brand clearly in a general sense, what we’re looking for here is search traffic, either directly or indirectly.

There are 3 main strategies:

  1. Paid search ads - These are typically expensive, but if your customer lifetime value (LTV) is high enough, it can work.

  2. Ranking in organic results - Obviously it’s ideal to rank #1 organically. It’s often possible because the top results are usually review sites that aren’t particularly optimized in terms of SEO. Will take time to see results.

  3. Being listed on third party sites - Go see what’s ranking for the “X alternative” term that you want to rank for. If you see a page on G2 for example in the top spot, you’ll want to try and get listed on that page. That will involve creating a company profile if you don’t already have one (with the same categories as your competitor), and ideally getting some reviews.

You can pursue any combination of these approaches, ideally all 3 if there’s enough search volume to justify it.