Imagine if anytime somebody searched on your competitor’s brand name, your website showed in the search results, giving you a chance to catch a potential customer that might have never looked beyond your competitor. Follow the steps below to gain search engine traffic and leads from your competitors by creating and optimizing a few pages on your website to target your competitor’s brand names. We’ll also show you below how to attract web searchers who type in comparison searches such as “Windows vs. Apple”.
Serve Comparison Shoppers
In order to rank in the search engines when someone does a “Windows vs. Apple” type search, create a web page that compares your brand and/or product offering to those of your competitors—let’s call this a “product matrix” page. This page should compare the features and benefits of your company or products to those of your competitors. Not only will this content be beneficial to prospective customers who would like to know how your offering stacks up, but this will also serve as great SEO content. Create at least one product matrix page that includes at least three to five of your competitors in the title tag, url and page headline (or <H1> tags).
Attract Your Competitor’s Search Engine Traffic and Leads
To rank on one of your competitors brand or product names, create a single competitor matrix page for each competitor or product name. Then link to this page from appropriate pages on your website using the competitor’s brand name as the anchor text on the link. From this page, you should also link back to your main product matrix page. These single competitor or single product comparison pages should attract traffic searching on your competitor’s brand or product name(s).
In addition to the more permanent product matrix pages above, you can include competitive terms legitimately in blog posts that discuss the benefits of your product over your competitors. Again, whenever you mention your competitor’s brand or product names, link to your matrix page. Also include your matrix pages in .html and .xml sitemaps.
Some Words of Caution…
When it comes to including competitive brand terms on your website as part of your overall SEO strategy, be sure not to hide any of this information. When site designers include competitive brand terms in meta tags without visible context, this is dangerous because doing so can be perceived by search engines to be site spam. When discovered, the search engines will penalize you and eliminate you from search results.
Off-site SEO Strategies to Boost Your Search Rank Further
To improve your rank on your competitor’s names, you should ensure that your product matrix pages are linked to from other sites on the web besides your own. The easiest way to build links from other sites is to post your product matrix content on sites such as Docstoc and SlideShare–just upload your content to these sites and link back to your website.
Turn to social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to evaluate your competitors and make comparisons. Find a competitor’s site on Wikipedia and link that entry to your competitive matrix. Or simply ask webmasters and bloggers that are friendly to your company to link to your matrix pages with the appropriate anchor text. None of these last strategies have a tremendous amount of “link juice,” that is strong link power, but all of them will open your site up to a wider audience.
