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 much website would be worth for SEO?
I have a website that I'm considering selling. It gives no profit, but I think it has decent SEO value. Link explorer report: domain authority = 69, linking domains: 9.8k, inbound links: 44.2m, ranking keywords: 294. Is that any good? Website is about web design, so keywords are also related to it. Would it be useful for SEO links building for other people? I did sell similar website once, but it was about 7-8 years ago and I've sold it for very high 5 digit amount. However things have changed since then in SEO world, so I don't know if today similar website would be worth much. There is so much information out there that contradicts each other, so I think I'd rather ask professionals here.
Paid Search Marketing | | CyberAlien70 -
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 -
Bing Ads Quality Score
Hi Mozzers, We've just imported (around two weeks ago) our Adwords into Bing and are just evaluating it. Pretty much across the board, but especially our best performing Ad Groups are showing up with abysmal quality scores. Case in point: our best ad group has mostly 10s, two 9s and one 7 in Adwords, yet nothing over 3 in Bing. Specifically landing page relevance is rated poor, keyword relevance and landing page experience as "no problem". So, what specifically is Bing looking for on landing page relevance that's dramatically different to Adwords? The Bing help references a blog post of 2 years ago suggesting increasing keyword count - yet the pages do well in organic search and adding more keywords to the copy will start to look artificial and stuffed, so I'm very reluctant to start there! Any pointers?
Paid Search Marketing | | WorldText0 -
Does sitewide SEO affect PPC Quality Score?
When evaluating a PPC landing page for Quality Score, does Google evaluate the other pages that the landing page is linked to? For example, if we have a well optimized page on the site for "Widgets", can it outscore a well optimized PPC landing page that is isolated in a "disallow" directory with no links into or out of the page? I'm not sure if I am making myself clear...
Paid Search Marketing | | CsmBill0 -
Adwords Keyword Quality Score changes when keyword is paused
Today I was pausing a bunch of low quality score keywords for a client, the thing is, once I paused the keywords, the quality score would immediately change. For example, a number of keywords that had a QS of 3 while they were running, immediately changed to 1 once paused. Out of curiosity I un-paused one of them and it remained at 1. Has anyone else experienced this and/or have an explanation? Cheers
Paid Search Marketing | | David_ODonnell0 -
Adwords quality score is bull?
Is it me or is Google Adwords quality score a load of bull. I use part numbers as my keywords and have virtually the same landing page for each one. The only difference is the order of the paragraphs in my descriptions, the product attributes and the SKU. so why does one part get an 7 and the other a 5? Surely they should be the same?
Paid Search Marketing | | DavidLenehan0 -
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