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
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 can I increase quality score when bidding on competitors?
I'm trying to increase my quality score when bidding on competitors. I've broken up each competitor into a separate ad group and focused on 5-10 keywords in each but my quality scores seem to stay around 3 - 5. I'd like them to be more in the neighborhood of 5-7 Currently my ad relevance is below average and feel that if I can increase that to at least average than I should see some better quality scores. Any advice on how to do this with the competition? Normally, I just focus ads around the use of the keywords but since the keywords are brand names, I can't do that with these ads.
Paid Search Marketing | | jarjarjarvis0 -
Is there a tool that can use measure and improve the quality score of my PPC landing pages?
Hey guys, I'm trying to improve the quality score for a few of my PPC landing pages. Does any one know a Tool that can help me in the process. Something kind of like the "on page grader" but for quality score. Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | Felip30 -
Is High PageRank Quality Related But Paid Directory Listing Still Work?
Hi, We are a local cleaning company in Singapore specialising in all types of home and office cleaning service. My question is after the Google Penguin, does high PR but paid directory still working?
Paid Search Marketing | | chanel27
Or it will be considered a toxic links. It is getting harder to do backlinking now so we really need to be very careful here.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 -
Competitors using bots for AdWords ?
I was having a discussion with a SEO manager on a LinkedIn group about page speed (she pretends that page speed is not taken into account by Google for SERPs at all and claims that all of what Matt Cutts says is BS) ; and she explained that she is using bots to click on her client's competitors AdWords and "kill their daily budget" So my question is, if you run/manage AdWords campaigns, have you ever met noticed such a behaviour, past the few usual click fraud rate ? What is your average fraud rate ?
Paid Search Marketing | | iung0 -
Downtrodden Adwords Quality Scores -- Really?
Wow! 93% of our Adword keywords in our new campaign received a Quality Score of 4 or less. That means most of the keywords aren't showing. I received the quick answer from our Adwords advisor that, "Quality score is created from a variety of factors ... etc." Yes, I know that by reading Google's documentation. I dug deeper into the data. When I looked at keywords dashboard for this campaign, what vexes me is that it's all about "Keyword relevance: poor". That is repeated time and again in the keywords hover, bubble pop-up in Adwords. "Landing page quality: no problems". "Landing page load time: no problems". 63% of keywords have quality score = 3 29% of keywords have quality score = 4 We have thousands of keywords that are electronic part numbers. All keywords use phrase matching. We use dynamic keyword matching in the ads. I dug deeper. I chose random keywords (and corresponding landing pages) from lower quality scores (1,2,3,4) and higher scores (5,6,7,8,9,10). What is the difference? Examples: Quality score 1 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/LM2901 2 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/BZX84-A20 3 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/MAX4796 4 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/TMP302A 5 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/LTC4267-3 6 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/CAT1161LI-28-G 7 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/DS1216C 8 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/R10S-E1Y1-J5.0K 9 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/208M822-19B11 145785-000 10 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/TP3-PNEU-0.250 243362-000 Notice URLs with score 9 and 10 have url-encoded space (%20) -- just pointing it out. What is the difference between these pages that have such different quality score? And, interestingly enough, the majority of example keywords in the Urls above (LM2901, BZX84-A20, etc) have zero impressions and zero clicks thus far. Yes, the keywords have low traffic because this is exactly what people search for an purchase when making a B2B component buy. It's all about the exact part number. **I'd love specific suggestions of how to improve quality score of pages with a 3 or lower! ** Thanks kindly, Loren
Paid Search Marketing | | groovykarma0