UserPilot – Templated Comparisons and “Alternatives” Content to Rapidly Scale SaaS Traffic

UserPilot, a user onboarding SaaS, achieved dramatic organic growth by rethinking its content operations and employing programmatic approaches for bottom-of-funnel keywords. After struggling with slow content output, UserPilot pivoted to a template-driven content production model that tripled their traffic in under a year:

From 4 to 40 Posts/Month – Process Automation

In 2021–2022, UserPilot revamped its content process to publish 10x more articles (scaling from ~4 to 40 blog posts per month). They did this by systematizing how topics are chosen and written. Instead of treating each blog as a one-off, they organized content into clusters and templates.

For example, they’d identify a high-intent pattern like “Best onboarding tools for X” and then produce variants for each X (X = different industries or roles) following the same outline. Writers focused on one cluster at a time (improving efficiency and consistency across 20+ related articles). They also heavily outsourced writing to freelancers but used strict templates and editorial guidelines so quality remained high even as quantity scaled.

This operational shift was a precursor to pSEO – essentially building an internal “content assembly line” that could be augmented with programmatic tactics.

Programmatic SEO with Keyword Patterns

UserPilot identified repeatable keyword formulas in their niche, especially competitor-related and solution-seeking queries. According to their Head of Marketing, they mapped out all “[Competitor] vs [Competitor]” and “[Competitor] alternatives” keywords relevant to product growth tools. These are prime bottom-of-funnel terms (searchers evaluating tools to purchase). Using programmatic methods, UserPilot created comparison pages for each combination – e.g. pages like “UserPilot vs Appcues”, “Appcues vs Pendo”, “Top 10 User Onboarding Tools” – covering every major player in their space.

Each page followed a template structure (intro, feature-by-feature comparison table, pros/cons, why UserPilot might be a better choice, etc.). By templatizing and semi-automating these, UserPilot rolled out dozens of comparison pages very quickly, ensuring they ranked whenever someone Googled “UserPilot vs X” or “X alternatives”.

Given the finite set of competitors, this was a one-time setup that kept working – whenever a new competitor emerged or a new keyword pattern was found (like “[software] for [specific use case]”), they could plug it into the template and launch a new page at minimal cost.

Results – Rapid Traffic and Lead Growth

This aggressive content scale-up paid off. It took UserPilot 3 years to reach ~25K monthly organic visits originally, but after embracing programmatic content ops, they hit 100K monthly visits just 10 months later. That is a threefold increase in under a year. The quality of traffic improved too – by focusing on “pain point SEO” (keywords indicating a need for a solution UserPilot offers), the visitors were more likely to convert. Indeed, 80% of UserPilot’s product leads were coming via the blog once this strategy matured.

Notably, they achieved this without dropping content quality: their use of structured templates and intense editorial processes kept the content useful and in-depth, which maintained SEO performance. UserPilot even boasts they can now produce 29 long-form blog posts per hour with their system (!) – an exaggeration perhaps, but indicative of how much efficiency they gained through automation and templates.

Key Takeaway

UserPilot’s case shows that even in a smaller B2B SaaS, programmatic principles (mass producing pages from patterns) can be applied to content marketing. By covering all the formulaic bottom-funnel queries (like “X vs Y”, “X for [niche]”), they left no gap for competitors and often rank alongside or above larger firms in their space. This content not only drove SEO traffic but positioned UserPilot against its rivals in the minds of potential customers.

Complemented by eBooks and resources (Emilia, their Head of Marketing, even wrote a book on content operations), this strategy helped UserPilot punch above its weight. It’s a blueprint for how smart automation and templating can help a startup rapidly scale inbound interest without a huge team or budget.