Price: How much a company charges.
Features: What a company offers.
Value chain: How a company creates and delivers its product.
I mentioned that differentiating based on price is the weakest position because someone else can challenge you to a race to the bottom or simply undercut your price.
Remember Jeff Bezos’ “your margin is my opportunity”? So, you want to figure out how to stand out in either features or the way you bring your product to market.
Three steps to feature-based differentiation:
List all features (e.g., heart-rate monitor) and attributes (e.g., water resistant) of your product.
Compare how each feature or attribute stacks up to rivals.
Challenge each factor: which can you remove, deprioritize, strengthen, or build?
Three steps to value-chain differentiation:
Map all activities your company goes through to create and deliver the product, from manufacturing to logistics and marketing.
Determine the cost and value of each activity (e.g., customer satisfaction and enterprise value).
Identify competitive advantage opportunities (e.g., unique or exclusive partnerships or features).
An alternative is the Kano Model, which maps product features to customer satisfaction and functionality based on a survey and groups them by:
Must-be (expected).
Performance (desired).
Attractive (excitement).
Indifferent (unimportant).
Reverse (dissatisfaction).
Mind you, differentiation can go away. Snapchat, for example, used to stand out much more with unique features until Instagram copied them. Repeating assessments regularly is critical.
SEO
Google seems to evaluate sites so much more on customer demand (brand search volume) and customer experience (user signals), which means SEO for undifferentiated products is like driving with the handbrake pulled.
In my experience, you need to be a lot more aggressive about SEO when working with an undifferentiated brand, which also increases the risk of being hit by algorithm updates.
In my experience, differentiated brands strongly benefit from robust basics and provide more wiggle room for creative approaches. They are more often rewarded by algorithm updates and achieve higher-than-average click-through rates in the search results.
Should you drop everything and ring the alarm about differentiation? No. Start with SEO.
In most cases, you can’t simply throw around recommendations for product differentiation as an SEO. Here’s how I recommend approaching differentiation:
Get SEO basics and low-hanging fruit into good shape.
Word on differentiating your SEO approach.
Then, look for documentation and strategy around differentiation.
If there’s none, do a high-level assessment.
If the assessment reveals low or no differentiation, challenge leadership to build stronger competitive advantages.
Assess your approach to SEO against competitors across three groups:
1. Content Uniqueness
Do you have unique expertise, angles, data, customer stories/testimonials/case studies?
Can you invest in programmatic/product-led SEO or editorial content in contrast to what everyone else is doing?
Can you forge unique or exclusive content partnerships?
2. Infrastructure
Do you have a flexible CMS?
Is your mobile setup robust or problematic?
Can you build custom tooling to move faster or surface unique insights?
Can you automate processes?
3. Authority
Do you have rare backlinks no one else can get?
Do you have popular experts writing content on your site?
Can you offer tools no one else has?
At G2, for example, we strongly leveraged the number of software solutions as a differentiator and reflected it in our titles, content, and user experience.
We leveraged attention from buyers as a lever for natural link building. And, we used our resource advantage to add unique content to different page types.
Hypothesis
Two of the biggest Search disruptors are AI chatbots and AI Overviews.
In my analysis of +500,000 AIOs, better-ranking sites are more likely to be cited. If differentiation leads to success in classic search, it also should in AI answers.
I want to validate two hypotheses in the near future to prove that point:
One, differentiated brands are less sensitive to AI Overviews and AI chatbots because they tend to get more direct visits than undifferentiated sites.
Two, differentiated brands can be more attractive for exclusive content-licensing deals (only an option for a small number of sites) and get more citations in AI Overviews and AI chatbots.
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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal