Using competitor brand names. How far is too far?
-
We are a small company competing for traffic in an industry with more or less one other very large brand. I'm noticing we are getting a descent amount of organic traffic for the competitor's brand name however I haven't done any on-page inclusion or link building for the term. We are using their brand as a keyword in our paid campaigns and seeing potential. I firmly believe we have a superior product. I'm tempted to start going after our competitor's brand as a keyword to skim some of their traffic. My question is how far it too far? Do I actively try to obtain a few anchor text specific backlinks? Dare I use their brand name as a term on our page? Maybe just a simple blog post comparing our two products is more appropriate? Any suggestions are appreciated.
-
A similar question was asked last month that might give you some insight as well. http://moz.com/community/q/should-i-use-my-competitor-s-name-in-my-content-to-help-my-rankings
-
I like your idea for comparison, however, be warned that once you open the box be prepared for counter campaigns by your competitor.
But I think a blog post like that sounds a natural and potentially a good source of conversions. Just be sure to be ready to back up any claims you make.
But yes, I like your idea, and thanks for the idea of using adwords advertising to do this. I like that too.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I have 100+ Landing Pages I use for PPC... Does Google see this as a blog farm?
I am currently using about 50-100 domains for geotargeted landing pages for my PPC campaigns. All these pages basically have the same content, I believe are hosted on a single unique ip address and all have links back to my main url. I am not using these pages for SEO at all, as I know they will never achieve any significant SEO value. They are simply designed to generate a higher conversion rate for my PPC campaigns, because they are state and city domains. My question is, does google see this as a blog/link farm, and if so, what should I do about it? I don't want to lose any potential rankings they may be giving my site, if any at all, but if they are hurting my main urls SEO performance, then I want to know what I should do about it. any advice would be much appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jfishe19881 -
Moving website and domain name without 301 Redirect or rel=canonical
I do not wish to draw attention to my company, so I am using code names. For the sake of this discussion, we are a new car dealership representing Brand X Cars. The manufacturer of Brand X Cars pushes its dealers toward a website hosting company called CarWebsites in order to maintain a level of quality and control with each dealer. However, we have found the platform to be too restricting, and are switching to our own WordPress site. Unfortunately Brand X is claiming ownership of our original domain, BrandXCarDealer.net, so we have switched to BrandXCarDealer.com (which we prefer anyways). Now both websites are running, and there is duplicate content of everything. Brand X is not cooperative and will not 301 redirect to the new site, and we do not have access to the of the website for a rel=canonical. Brand X is also dragging its feet on shutting down BrandXCarDealer.net. We do still have access to change the content of the pages on the BrandXCarDealer.net site, but that is pretty much as far as our control goes. So my question is, is there anything we can do, without using a 301 redirect or rel=canonical, to tell Google to pay attention to the new BrandXCarDealer.com rather than the old BrandXCarDealer.net? Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VanMaster0 -
What do you think of this "SEO software" that uses Rand's "proven method" ?
I saw an ad on Search Engine Roundtable and the call to action was... "What is the #1 metric that Google uses to rank websites?" I thought, "I gotta know that!". (I usually don't click ads but this one tempted me.) So I clicked in and saw a method "proven by Rand Fishkin" that will "boost the rankings of your website". This company has software that will use Rand's proven method (plus data from another unattributed test to boost the rankings of your website). I am not going to use this software. The video made my BS meter ring. But if you want to see it.... http://crowdsearch.me/special-backdoor/ Rather than use this "software", I would suggest using kickass title tags that deliver the searcher to kickass content. That has worked really well for me for years. Great title tags and great content will produce the same results. The bonus for you is that the great content will give you a real website.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EGOL1 -
Site that's 301 redirected is ranking for brand
We own a number of foreign TLD domains for our brand. They are all 301-redirected to our main .com branded domain. One of them is appearing in our branded search results, outranking out main .com page. To be clear, this is despite there being a 301 redirect from it to the .com page. Any ideas on what is going on here?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ipancake0 -
What is the difference between using .htaccess file and httpd.conf in implementing thousands of 301 redirections?
What is the best solution in terms of website loading time or server load? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Preparing for Penguin: Delete or Change to Branding 25 small blogs, anchor text
Hello, This site has 80 root domains pointing to the domain, call it site X. 25 of them are tiny blogs the owner put up himself. The blogs consist only of 4 posts or so, where each post has a 2 keyword anchor text links to each one of his 4 sites. One link in each post goes to the home page and one goes to an internal page. Let's concern ourselves with cleaning up the anchor text profile of site X. All blogs are on private registration. Half of the blog domain names are furniture related and furniture is not relevant to this niche. But 3/4 to 3/5 of the content of each blog (2 paragraphs per post and 4 posts) is relevant. My concern is that even though the anchor text is varied and there's only 2 links going out to site X per blog, none of it is branded and so I'm concerned about Penguin type updates. Should we change these to branded or delete them? We're working on content promotion for backlinks in case we have to delete these blogs, but it's a small budget. What should we do? '
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
SEO best practice: Use tags for SEO purpose? To add or not to add to Sitemap?
Hi Moz community, New to the Moz community and hopefully first post/comment of many to come. I am somewhat new to the industry and have a question that I would like to ask and get your opinions on. It is most likely something that is a very simple answer, but here goes: I have a website that is for a local moving company (so small amounts of traffic and very few pages) that was built on Wordpress... I was told when I first started that I should create tags for some of the cities serviced in the area. I did so and tagged the first blog post to each tag. Turned out to be about 12-15 tags, which in turn created 12-15 additional pages. These tags are listed in the footer area of each page. There are less than 20 pages in the website excluding the tags. Now, I know that each of these pages are showing as duplicate content. To me, this just does not seem like best practices to me. For someone quite new to the industry, what would you suggest I do in order to best deal with this situation. Should I even keep the tags? Should I keep and not index? Should I add/remove from site map? Thanks in advance for any help and I look forward to being a long time member of SEOMoz.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BWrightTLM0 -
What happens if a company only uses black hat techniques for an extended period of time?
Let's say I were to start a company. Of course, I want to be indexed, crawled, and pulled up in the search engines. So I start using black hat seo techniques. I comment spam, keyword stuff, spin articles, hide text, etc. I publish hundreds of articles per day on well know sites with excellent page rank. If I am doing all of these unethical techniques, what is going to happen to my website?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FrontlineMobility0