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
-
Does Google checks the author name of the articles with backlinks to a website?
Hi, This may sound a little too suspicious; but just want to take your suggestions and experience in this. We are trying to create articles on third party websites to increase backlinks, our brand popularity and awareness about our features. If the same author is mentioned in multiple or tens of articles with backlinks to same website; will Google monitor the author name? Is there anything wrong in creating too many external articles with same author name? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Google URL Shortener- Should I use one or multiple???
I have a client with a number of YouTube videos. I'm using Google URL Shortner to allow the link to show in the YouTube text (as its a long URL). Many of these links go to the same page ex .com/services-page Should I use a single short URL for each video linking to the .com/services-page or should they be unique each time? If unique, would Google possibly think I'm trying to manipulate results? Thanks in advance. I'm just not sure on this one and hope someone knows best practice on this. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mgordon1 -
Is there any SEO impact to using "www" vs. non-"www" preferred domain name?
My client has been using "www" with his domain and before I took over, has used it in marketing etc. I typically don't use "www" in my wordpress setup, and set non-www as the preferred domain in google analytics and google search console. Does it make any difference? Especially when www resolves to non-www? I appreciate some guidance with this.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chill9860 -
What tools do you use to find scraped content?
This hasn’t been an issue for our company so far, but I like to be proactive. What tools do you use to find sites that may have scraped your content? Looking forward to your suggestions. Vic
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VicMarcusNWI0 -
If Google Authorship is used for every page of your website, will it be penalized?
Hey all, I've noticed a lot of companies will implement Google Authorship on all pages of their website, ie landing pages, home pages, sub pages. I'm wondering if this will be penalized as it isn't a typical authored piece of content, like blogs, articles, press releases etc. I'm curious as I'm going to setup Google Authorship and I don't want it to be setup incorrectly for the future. Is it okay to tie each page (home page, sub pages) and not just actual authored content (blogs, articles, press releases) or will it get penalized if that occurs? Thanks and much appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Should I use nofollow or don’t I have to worry about that?
I'm a developer and each time than I put at the bottom of the sites I build my company's logo with a link to our site. Could This action harm my website? Should I use nofollow or don’t I have to worry about that?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
What Google considers to be a branded keyword?
We can set our own keywords as branded in SeoMoz campaign, but Google would not necessarily see them like branded. After reading the Blog post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update I had a question: Are there known rules (or at least guesses) what Google considers a branded keyword/anchor text? I guess the first one would be your website domain. So bluewidget.com for example would be a branded keyword for bluewidget.com website. How about Blue Widget or Blue Widget Company?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SirMax0 -
Negative SEO - Case Studies Prove Results. De-rank your competitors
Reading these two articles made me feel sick. People are actually offering a service to de-rank a website. I could have swore I heard Matt Cutts say this was not possible, well the results are in. This really opens up a whole new can of worms for google. http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/ http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/ This is only going to get worse as news like this will spread like wildfire. In one sense, its good these people have done this to prove it to google its just a pity they did it on real business's that rely on traffic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dean19860