Ranking for competitor brand terms
-
We're looking to rank for competitor brand terms and have created competitor brand pages for some of our main competitors. My question is where would be most effective to place these pages on our site?
Also, would this be classed as grey hat?
-
Can i re-open this questioning line?
We are interested in a similar strategy in order to help educate some customers who are falling victim to an unscrupulous operator in the market.
We know we can get links to our site for their brand name because there are a lot of scandals people are falling victim to based around this operator with government bodies and charities trying to raise awareness in terms of what it means to get involved with this player. They are very good at marketing to people who feel they do not have many options under their circumstances however alternatives exist and our goal is to raise awareness.
Does anyone know the legality of using competitors brand names on our site providing the information is factual and transparent?
-
completely doable, but you open yourself up to a possible lawsuit which I believe is the biggest risk here.
-
Yeah, this is kind of crazy in most cases and if you are doing this for a client, this is where you have to put your 'I know what I am talking about' hat on and tell them this is a bad idea.
Why is it a bad idea?
- It will be difficult
- a high percentage of any traffic you get will just bounce
if I search for SEOMoz then I want SEOMoz. If I search for BowlerHat (my site) then I want BowlerHat. These are navigational search queries, the user is trying to find something they know exists so if you manage to somehow persuade google you should outrank the brands themselves for these terms in this brand driven SEO landscape (hint) then it will likely be a huge waste of time anyway.
Of course, there are always exceptions, maybe you sell an official product more cheap than the official supplier or some such, but if that is the case, look for search terms that more closely map what it is you offer.
So, to recap, go to your boss, throw a bucket of ice cold water over him, slap him around the face, and tell him to give you a more achievable and worthwhile task - or else.
-
Hello Nicola,
In my 4 years of experience as an agency SEO I only once accept this challenge and that is because my client was a reseller and he wants to come up on the 1<sup>st</sup> page with the brand name of the manufacturer. I believe if this is the case at your end then I don’t think this make you wear a gray hat but in my experience this is extremely difficult in terms of competition and takes a long way to be on the first page.
If your case is not similar to the one mentioned above then I would want you to consider few important things before planning this:
- Trust of your own brand
Think from the angle of a visit that type in your competitor’s key phrases and find your website. After clicking it he/she might not find what he/she was expecting and this is where you will lose your own brand’s trust level.
If people are coming to your website and do not find what they are really looking for then eventually you will lose the trust of your own website/brand.
- Bounce Rate
If people coming to your website from your competitor’s brand name.. I believe they will only increase the bounce rate because of the fact that they didn’t find what exactly they were looking for.
- Killing User experience
This activity might kill the user experience to a higher extent due to the fact that you are taking them somewhere else when they are looking for something else.
-
Thanks for the feedback Matt.
We aren't aiming to try and outrank our competitors, just appear on page 1 for those who have recently taken a significant amount of market share over the past few months, with the intention of capturing some of their traffic.
However, you do raise some valid points re loss of customer trust that we will definitely take on board and discuss.
-
Hi Nicola,
I think that you need to think about 2 things here before you go ahead with this:
Firstly, I would definitely class this as grey hat. It could be said to be a mild form of negative SEO. I don't quite know how your users would feel about this as well, because many people will actually see right through this. As well as this, if you are going to try and outrank your competitors for their own brand name, it means that you are going to be competing with their homepage, which is likely to be extremely difficult seeing as you will have a hard job getting links to your 'competitor brand pages'.
Secondly, it is worth thinking about how this will affect your brand. For example, if a user enters your website through another brand-name page, it could provide them with a lot of confusion, and this could lose trust with your customers.
Personally, I would stay away from this tactic, as you have much more to lose than gain in this kind of scenario.
Matt.
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
-
How would you push up a page that is already ranking in the top 20?
One of our pages is currently ranking around the 11th position in Google. According to MOZ page grader its page optimization score is an A. I've manually checked the on page optimization and it's done properly. Our page speed is in the 20s according to google page speed insight tool and when I look at one of our top competitors their scores are in the 60s. So that may be an issue. Our DA is 70 and our top competitor's DA is 85. However we have more backlinks and social shares for our page. So do you think our page speed may be working against us? What else would you check or consider optimizing? I'm just trying to come up with other possible causes that would be working against us. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | eddys_kap1 -
.htaccess Question and Ranking
I have some basic rules set up in my .htaccess file and just curious as to the implications of them as I seem to have a website ranking very low on Search indexes for no particular reason that I can fathom. My question is a follows I have a htaccess rules set up in my application application that first strips the file suffix and then adds a closing brace for example Rule 1: http://www.domain.com/my_page.php becomes http://www.domain.com/my_page
On-Page Optimization | | ecrmeuro
Rule 2: http://www.domain.com/my_page becomes http://www.domain.com/my_page/ Will this rule expecially Rule 2 effect ranking or will these rule have no adverse affect on the website as my MOZ reports still seem to have pages listed win the Top Pages by PA section without the www? Below is an example of the htacess file. RewriteEngine On Redirect Trailing Slashes... RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L] Redirect non-WWW to WWW... RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^contractor-accounts.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.contractor-accounts.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301] Handle Front Controller... RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]0 -
Is Brand name anchor text on a widget Spam
We have partial match penalty in WMT on one of our smaller sites. There are a few (less than 10) instances of widgets linking to us using our Brand Name as the anchor text. Would this fail a reconsideration request do you think? The widget links without the no-follow attribute.
On-Page Optimization | | Simonws0011 -
Organic Rankings - Y=5, B=2, G=Not Found!
My on-page SEO efforts are focused on generating higher visibility in Google's SERPs for my site: http://www.thegrossmanlawoffice.com. My primary keyword phrase is "winter garden divorce lawyer" I have noticed that my home page ranks higher in Yahoo (5) and Bing (2) for my primary keyword, and Google does display my site in the 7-pack local results but does not rank my home page organically. It actually ranks my business's Facebook page on page 3 of the SERPs. Yahoo includes me in the local listings in position #2...at least today it does! I am happy that Google includes me in the local results, and I am curious why it does not rank my home page organically at all. Yahoo's rankings seem to be accurately tracking my keyword phrases and the appropriate pages, and it has me ranking really well for many of my keyword phrases. I am not quite sure why Yahoo and Bing see my relevant pages and seem to be ranking me appropriately, but Google is not. I recently (within last week) cleaned up my backlink profile per a great suggestion I received here. Is that the likely culprit? Any thoughts? Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | ajgrossman0 -
Do images on a CDN affect my Google Ranking?
I have recently switched my images to a CDN (MaxCDN) and all of the images within my post are now get loaded directly from the CDN. Will this affect my Google ranking? Do Google care if the image is hosted physicaly on the domain?
On-Page Optimization | | Amosnet0 -
Images being ranked
I have a client who is concerned about the performance of his images ranking on Google Images. I have taken a look at the obvious things like - alt tags, title tags , file names. I am not sure why he is struggling quite so much to get his images ranked well as the sites he is competing against and who are already ranking are a very poor quality. This is his site - http://www.ukweddingfavours.co.uk Would really appreciate your feedback and I can dish out some good answers.
On-Page Optimization | | onlinemediadirect0 -
If i only want to rank for one specific keyword and use it in all my page titles, will it negatively affect my rankings?
If i want to rank highest for one specific keyword (virtualization management, for example) and use that keyword in all the titles on my website, will that negatively affect my search rankings? SEOmoz is telling me that i should use unique titles for my different pages to ensure that they describe each page uniquely and don't compete with each other for keyword relevance.
On-Page Optimization | | foonista0 -
How do I check how a competitor ranks in the UK vs. US?
In building my strategy I want to check how well my competitors rank in country specific searches, for example in Canada or the UK vs. the US. Can someone help me by pointing me in the right direction? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | jclubb0