Like any industry, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be abused when practitioners bend the rules. This is ominously called “black hat SEO.” While it’s not likely you’ll encounter actual dark arts in paid search (aka pay-per-click or PPC), now and then you’ll see a tactic that tries to trick the game in order to win rankings. This is one of the biggest reasons you should be bidding on your brand keywords and trademarking your brand.
Sometimes protecting your trademark is as easy as asking. For example, the Big G—Google—reviews claims and then removes anyone bidding on and advertising for trademarked brands. Their process works, but it means you have to keep a vigilant eye on anyone bidding on your name or brand trademarks. Especially if you sell to resellers and affiliates this is extremely difficult to enforce. There are tools available to monitor these poachers more easily. Try AdGooroo Trademark Insight, The Brand Protection Agency or the emfluence Brand Protection Tool to start monitoring ads for your brand trademarks.
In addition to protecting your trademark, bidding on your brand can increase revenues. I recently saw this with a client who started bidding on their brand words only after they saw a competitor was bidding (poaching).
I noticed the offending ads during some research, and I did a double take. Not only was someone bidding on the client’s brand, they were sending traffic directly to the client’s website. There weren’t even diverting traffic to an outside site! There was no affiliate code in the URL, so there was no way to identify who built the ad. They also appeared to be running the same ads and keywords on Microsoft adCenter.
By running ads on the client’s brand and sending traffic to the client’s domain, the official ads for the client are effectively blocked because the offending party was there first. Even though our client provided official and more accurate ads, they’d been blocked by a company that put up so-so advertising leading to the client’s website.
I contacted the client, who had no idea who the phantom advertiser might be. They asked their affiliates, but found nothing. I also contacted Big G, hopeful for a fast fix, but as I suspected, Google wouldn’t take action without a trademark claim (fortunately, this client has one for their brand).
As I waited for the claim to be processed, I wondered: Can anyone bid on any brand keyword and create ads saying whatever they want linking to the brand’s true domain? I submitted my question to Google, and got a non-response.
What I’ve gathered from this case: you can create an ad for any company, send traffic to their site, and say whatever you want in the ad. BUT, a company/brand can file a claim to force you out as long as they’ve trademarked their brand. If they don’t have a trademark, you could run that faux ad indefinitely. Think of the possibilities!
(Please note that all of these examples are tongue-in-cheek. All three of these companies are smart and bid on their own brand!)
This isn’t likely to happen to most companies. We’re talking about spending money on a very strange tactic that really holds no value. But it’s interesting that anyone could do this to any brand as long as they aren’t breaking any editorial rules. It’s basically a way to block someone from being able to run ads on their brand, which may not qualify as evil, but is certainly annoying.
Lesson learned: it’s important to bid on your own brand words and phrases to keep poachers from doing it for you.
