Should I use my competitor's name in my content to help my rankings?

[greaterstudio]

If I have a competitor that ranks higher than me, would it be helpful to use their name in my content, or in my meta information?

[MikeRoberts]

Legitimate comparative use should be fine. So if you wrote a blog post about how your service compares to two or three others in your industry, or had a page on your site about the common services offered by your competitors and how you stacked up in comparison to show you have more or better priced services, those would likely be considered fair use. Just make sure you're not saying anything blatantly deceptive or slanderous.

[greaterstudio]

Thanks for the feedback so far! I'm an SEO novice, and am definitely not trying to do anything deceptive.

What if you were a training company explaining why someone should use you instead of "Competitor A"? Would using that competitor's name be acceptable in that case?

[MikeRoberts]

Had a competitor try to do this once but he wasn't a fan of listening to our request to have the mentions removed. I literally scoured their entire site, created a massive excel sheet of all instances of our company name/website used without our permission, and then we had to mention "legal action" before  they complied. So... don't use a competitor's name without their permission. If its the case of using their brand name on a product you offer that is actually their brand product, well that's fair use and fine.

E.G. if you have Taylor Made products on your site and your pages & copy say Taylor Made then that's fair use. If your site offerings have nothing to do with them and you just mention them hoping to leech traffic and/or rankings, then that's deceptive.

[EGOL]

Only with their permission.