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What To Do When A Competitor Targets Your Brand Keywords

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First, we’ll talk about the Google Ads bidding.

Often we can see that many companies are bidding on their competitor’s keywords on Google Ads. Especially, they are targeting “review” keywords and at the end of the review they are claiming they are a better brand and poaching the customers. 

Now the question is, is it legal? The straight answer is, Yes it is legal if your business is not trademarked. 

If your business name is trademarked, according to Google Guidelines, no other brands can use that name in their ad copy. There is an exception to the rules that only legitimate resellers can use. 

Now, What’s the Solution? You can minimize their effort and protect your brand keyword by doing the following things: 

  1. Trademark your Company

Trademarking your company name will allow you to minimize traffic theft. 

Still, there are many cases where they can use your Brand Keyword unless they are using it in their Ad Copies. According to Google’s policy, they can’t use it in their ad copies. If they do, you can submit a trademark complaint to Google.

  1. Run PPC Campaigns on Your Brand Keywords

Run regular PPC Campaigns using your Brand Keyword so that competitors can’t snatch your potential customers. 

  1. Sending Competitors a Cease and Desist letter

In many extreme cases, you can send your competitors a cease and desist letter, which is a document sent to warn your competitors that you may take legal action against them.

Still confused about what to do? Schedule a one hour Free Consultation with our experts. 

Now, Let’s talk about Organic Search Results.

It’s rare that someone else is ranking on your brand keywords. But in some cases, we have seen that someone is searching for your company in search engines but search engines are showing your competitors’ website. If you see someone else’s website is outranking you in your brand keywords that means your website is under a serious threat. 

So, what is the reason behind this?

Two of the major reasons behind this is Google Penalty Attack and Bad Reputation. But there can be other reasons as well, like low quality content, high spam score, crawling issues and many more. 

So, what should you do, in this situation?

Depending on the reason, there are different solutions to this situation. 

If it’s due to Google Penalty, low quality content or crawling issue then you need a solid strategy to optimize your website properly. You need to optimize your website content, logo or images that don’t have your brand keywords and make sure search engine crawlers can index everything properly.

If it’s due to Bad Reputation where your competitors are poaching your customers through posting false bad reviews about your brand then you need to report the false reviews, post your customers positive reviews on your website and Google. You also need to outrank the contents of your competitors that they’re using to defame your brand. 

Now the big question, how do you figure out what’s preventing you from outranking your competitors in your own brand keywords? The only way to find out the exact reason behind ranking lower in your brand keywords is to do a proper SEO audit of your website. 

We have a team of SEO experts in our company who are constantly dealing with this kind of problem for the past 10+ years. 
You can have a one hour free consultation with one of our experts if you think business is under the threat of your competitors.

Author Details

Abdullah Mahmud is the Head of the SEO department at MonsterClaw LLC. With over 8+ years of experience under his belt, Abdullah aspires to help growth-focused companies with their SEO campaigns.