Talking about competitors on your own website to improve quality score
-
Hi Mozzers,
I'm seeing more and more companies improving their quality score by including information about their competitors on their website, when driving traffic from competitor brand terms. For example, for 'Yahoo Mail' related terms, Zoho drive traffic via an ad to this page:
https://www.zoho.com/mail/yahoo-mail-alternative.html
I'm planning a new campaign targeting competitor keywords and wondered what people think about this approach, and the legalities around talking about and comparing yourself to competitors on your own website?
-
Thanks Alick300,
It's interesting to hear a mix of view points. In my industry (cloud software) it's more commonplace, and as @Robert Cairns states above, it can work well.
As with most areas of digital marketing, I think I'll tread carefully with a test and learn approach
-
Hi,
No you shouldn't use competitors brand name on your website because competitors will ask you to remove or will take some legal action against you & strictly no in Adwords ad copy. I know many advertisers who use competitors brand name as keyword including me but we don't use their brand name on any web page.
QS mainly affected by CTR so don't bother about using their brand name on the website just try to get maximum CTR.
Thanks
-
Hi Alick300,
Thanks for getting back to me.
I'm talking about quality score when running an Adwords campaign, and landing page relevance being a factor for each keyword. So if I'm bidding on 'Competitor X' as a keyword, talking about 'Competitor X' on my landing page will increase relevance and quality score.
Thank you for sharing the article... really useful!
-
Hi RobinEx,
I don't understand which quality score are you talking about. are you running campaign on google Adwords/Bing because these two advertising platform using quality score for each keyword??
If you want to target competitors brand name to get more visitors/leads that then you are on right path and many Advertisers on various advertising platform using this idea.
For Google Adwords & Bing you can target competitors brand name as keyword but you can't use competitors brand name in your ad copy*
I'm sharing an article in which you will find pros and cons on above technique.
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/06/12/bidding-on-competitor-brands
Hope this helps you.
Thanks
-
Hello,
I would say that from a user experience standpoint, this is a terrific idea. You give you prospects everything they are looking for upfront and without them having to go to multiple websites. It is, of course, more advantageous if/when you can show that you are a better option than your competition, although showing that you are better across all fronts might leave some people suspicious of your brand.
It can be a bit of a double-edged sword, although I personally believe it is a risk worth taking if your products/services are comparable in quality and cost to your competition. I've been down this road with several of my clients with mixed results - as long as our content marketing strategies were controlled and reviewed for quality, we never had a problem. If people fire from the hip without fact-checking, you can run into real trouble.
Legally speaking, the waters are a bit muddier. For one, if you are copying anything from a competitor's site and showcasing it on your own, you are (at the very least) plagiarizing. If you misrepresent them in any way, you are liable to legal action, which can get messy. You also put yourself on their radar for future events and time periods, so it is best to have your ducks lined up before you go this route assuming you are competitive to them.
That being said, there is nothing in the law stopping you from price comparison tools, etc. Using a company's logo is gray territory. I would also add that you make sure you are not trash-talking your competitors if you are going to compare your products/services with theirs. Make sure you can back up literally everything you are saying with demonstrable facts, and you will be okay.
Hope this helps! Feel free to reach out to me at any time and we can put our heads together on how to make your new campaign work!
Cheers,
Rob
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
-
Website is flagged by Google as Compromised Site
Hi everyone, We have been running Google Ads for a while now and last week all of our Google Ads were paused with reason Compromised Site. We reached out to Google and they identify this page as one of the affected page: https://manpower.com.vn/vi/dich-vu-san-dau-nguoi-and-tu-van-nhan-su-cap-cao? The malicious links they found are:
Paid Search Marketing | | ManpowerVietnam
• googie-anaiytics[.]com
• vty68[.]net We have asked our Website vendor to scan and they found nothing. We would be greatly appreciated if you could help. I tried Google Search Console and even the tool Google Safe Browsing that Google itself suggested but both the tools showed that our website does not have any malicious links at all. And yet Google Ads support team keeps telling us our page contains these links. I am wondering if anyone in the community has experienced this before and how did you address this issue. Or could you guys please help to share any tools that you know can do a deep scan on this page and if possible our entire website to help us identify where the links are located? Please let me know if you need any additional information from us and I would be happy to provide it.1 -
How to track in Google Analytics 2 different subdomains (one for website, the other for PPC landing pages)
Hello Mozers! I have a website with organic visits/goals on www.site.com and a few AdWords Campaign landing pages on lp.site.com whose goals are tracked with both adwords conversion monitoring AND analytics (not imported from analytics into Adword). The landing pages of the campaign have nothing to do with the web site (different cms, they don't link each other, totally isolated) and viceversa. Given that, what would it be the best practice to configure Google Analytics to track the website (www.site.com) AND a PPC campagin (lp.site.com)? I have been told to set up different views of the same property, but do I really need that? Please let me know what are you thinking. Thank you very much. DoMiSoL Rossini
Paid Search Marketing | | DoMiSoL0 -
Does having redirects in a Adwords text ad destination URL hurt quality scores?
I recently noticed that one of my clients had several redirects in their Adwords text ad destination URLs. I updated the destination URLS to land on the final location (thereby losing all the text ad history). However I'm wondering if this could have any impact on the text ad quality scores (none of them were disapproved).
Paid Search Marketing | | RosemaryB0 -
PPC for Luxury Goods Website
Hi Mozzers, I am starting a PPC campaign for a website that sells high-end products. The search volume for the generics is very high but I think the conversion rate on those will be quite low given the price of the products. Does anyone have any experience in doing PPC for high-end retailers and what type of keyword I should be bidding on? Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | KarlBantleman0 -
How to improve data analysis that come from the Analytics ?
Hello guys,
Paid Search Marketing | | WayneRooney
im manager the PPC campaign to the company that im working.
Its a t shirt printing company.
I know how PPC and how its work but im not an expert. So far the campaign is working and we getting clicks and and leads. But, i cant understand perfectly how to look at the information and decide whether the campaign works well. For example : What is considered a good conversion ratio?
What is considered a good conversion cost?
How do I get a final summary of how much i spent and how much was the income ? I add tracking code to the 2 main pages,
The page when they leave their information - The quote,
and the thank you - The payment page. The problem is, that we don't sale t shirts online, we are printing house so we cant know by the number of the peoples that
land the thank you page the value of the deal, its can be 10 shirts or 1000 shirts. Is there's a way to track all the information's but more accurately?
To know each lead that come to our system from where he came from ? Thank you very much for your help !!0 -
Trademarked words in in Google Adwords ads - Why do competitors get to use them?
Hi, The keyword I want to use in my ad is trademarked, so they disqualified my ad. The trademark was specifically cited as the reasoning. I tried this across maybe 5 different ads. All disqualified The thing I don't understand is that there are like 10 other advertisers who are actively using this "trademarked" word in their ads. It's not like 1 scooted past Google, there's a ton of advertisers doing it. So how do I get past them or were they grandfathered in or something? FYI... I tried dynamic insert to see if that could my "trademarked" word in the back door, but no luck. Any other ideas? Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | marketingcupcake0 -
Does having a new website design and code affects the SEO
Dear experts, We are in the process of completely revamping our website code and design to a new version of prestashop. Having mentioned that, please note that we are not changing the URL links. So, the same products links will be the same and intact. Only the content is changing. So, how this is affecting my website SEO or SERP? Regards,
Paid Search Marketing | | kanary0 -
Adwords Quality Score and On-Page SEO
I'm trying to convince a large, multinational company that is very resistant to change, into making my on-page SEO changes. Compounding this resistance is the fact that the Analytics, SEO, PPC, and web dev departments are all under different people and they don't communicate very well. So, in order to get them to work together, I've decided to appeal to the places where they are sensitive; e.g., the PPC department where they surely have the desire to be more efficient with their budget. To appeal to this sensitivity, and with my goal of getting on-page changes done to help the SEO dept, I'm considering making the argument that my on-page changes will raise their quality score which will in turn lower the amount they are spending on PPC. Basically, is this a fair argument? Do you have an evidence to back this up? Best in the Midwest, Phil p.s. Hi, Joanna 😉
Paid Search Marketing | | PapaRelevance0