How to handle knock-off product leveraging your brand keywords?

[J-Me]

Hello all,

I fear this may be a bit of newcomer question but maybe you can help me out.

My business is in a highly competitive market, and when you search for our branded name many of our competitors show up in search results well before us (who don't contain, or even reference, our brand name on their site). We're trying to take a proactive approach to content development and site enhancement, but I am wondering if there's anything on the defense-front that we can do to better own our brand ranking in SERPs.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Should I be reading SEO 101?

Thanks

[RuthBurrReedy]

Google should be able to understand that all these are variations on your brand name, so you shouldn't need to worry much about that from a link building/organic search perspective. On the paid search side, you'll want to bid on as many variations of your brand as you currently see driving traffic or mentions to your site.

[RuthBurrReedy]

No, AdWords spend has no impact on your organic rankings. Running AdWords can give you other good insights, though, such as how well different keywords convert when they drive traffic.

[J-Me]

Another great reply, thank you! We actually just met with our PR firm and discussed drumming up some positive coverage in part for link building. We'll definitely be trying to tackle more of this in 2016+.

One of our challenges is the broad range of things people refer to us as in the market. Some call us "Happy Joe cars", others call us "Happy-Joe cars", "Happy Joe autos", etc. We are officially "Happy-Joe Cars" but most don't know to search for that, either omitting the "-" or creating some variation of that.

Would you happen to have any advice on how to capture variations, or should that not matter?

Thank you again.

[J-Me]

Apologies for the slow response, but thank you for the great answer. We had thought about trying this out, but I'm curious... in the long run would running adwords actually help our organic ranking?

[Alick300]

Hi Jamie,

Yes I have a suggestion for you. You can start Google Ad words search campaign for branded keywords only. You will be at number 1 in no time and I hope CPC would be very low because you are using your brand name as keywords.

You can also try this for Bing if your sites getting significant number of searches from Bing.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Jamie,

Don't stress about asking newbie questions, that's what we're here for!

Most of the time when we see this happen it's because the overall site strength is quite weak and the brand name is very close to a major term. e.g. if the industry is car hire, the brand name is something like Joe's Car Hire.

This being the case, there are a few basic things you can do that should at least see you rank up for your own brand:

Use your brand name in a consistent way across the site. This can be in your page titles, headings, body content etc. It doesn't really matter where, as long as it makes sense to use it there; don't force it! Using the above example, don't mix it up and use a combination of Joe's Car Hire, Joe's Professional Car Hire, Car Hire from Joes, try to keep it consistent so it's clear that the exact phrase "Joe's Car Hire" is your brand name.

Actively work on improving your sitewide strength. Start with all the usual culprits. Make sure your page titles, headings, content, navigation, sitemap etc etc are all on point and sufficient, as well as your backlink profile. I know this is very broad advice but if you're not ranking for your own brand, there must be a few things currently lacking.

As for being defensive, there really isn't anything you can do about this one, particularly given the fact that they're not using your brand name anywhere on their site so they're making no active attempt to do this.

I hope this helps!