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Archived: How to Tackle the Sneaky Tactics of your Competitors

29/05/2018 - Digital Marketing

Though the world of ecommerce is fast moving, some things will remain as they always have been – companies want to out-do their competitors.

Making sure your company appears as high as it can in search results is an absolute must. But if you occupy a position one of your competitors wants, don’t be surprised to find yourself under attack.

Such attacks have the potential to be very damaging. Take a look at this example from the US. Houston iPhone Screen Repair found itself under attack from a disgruntled vendor and had no fewer than 95 one-star reviews on Facebook in the space of half an hour.

These reviews weren’t genuine. They came from Brazil rather than Houston for one thing – which is a pretty clear giveaway! But all the same the attack weakened the company’s online reputation drastically, bringing the business down to 2.6 stars on Facebook.

Unfortunately, Facebook didn’t have the systems in place to protect Houston iPhone Screen Repair and in another instance, this malicious attack could have had a major long-term impact on the reputation of the business.

Thankfully, the owner told the full story and received massive public support for highlighting the kind of negative, malicious tactics some people use to target specific businesses, thus turning a potential negative into a big positive. But other businesses might not be able to do this.

Know Where your Brand is

Many attempts to lower ratings via malicious competitor tactics are successful if the company on the receiving end is not savvy enough to respond to reviews and protect themselves.

It’s therefore imperative for companies to stay on top of their brand mentions. By knowing where your company is being discussed, you can help ensure any negative reviews are quickly countered. This will ultimately boost your brand’s reputation and enhance the customer experience.

Also, if you are subject to the kind of attack Houston iPhone Screen Repair suffered from, you can react and tackle the problem as quickly as possible before it gets out of hand. Obviously, we hope it doesn’t happen to you, but it’s better to be prepared in case it does!

Fighting click fraud

Another nefarious tactic that some sneaky companies adopt as part of their digital marketing strategy in an attempt to gain an upper hand over the competition is click fraud.

This sees your ad repeatedly clicked by a competitor, thus make your paid advertising and PPC campaigns more expensive and ultimately reducing your return on investment.

Google has a robust anti-click fraud programme that uses advanced algorithms to detect and act against clicks that are not genuine.

Any click that is deemed invalid by Google will not be charged for. But that doesn’t mean they’ll catch every single invalid click.

However, if you suspect you may be targeted by click fraud, let Google know and they will open up an investigation based on reports into suspicious activity from the advertiser.

Suffice it to say Google is on your side when it comes to tackling click fraud. But there are plenty of other steps you can take to protect yourself.

Be Ethical in your Approach

‘Treat others how you’d like to be treated’ is a pretty good approach when it comes to PPC. Don’t just click on your competitor PPC ads and think that to be par for the course. You wouldn’t want them to click yours and force you to splash out on nothing at all.

Depending on the kind of relationship you have with your competitors, it might be a better idea to reach out and suggesting that you both steer clear of one another’s PPC adverts and don’t click on them.

If you can reach a kind of truce, you both stand to win both in terms of money saved and improving the authenticity of clicks.

If you are able to reach this sort of agreement with the various competitors in your field and everybody sticks to it, that makes for a fairer marketplace.

Monitor the competition

Though ethics are important in business, there’s unfortunately no guarantee others will act in an ethical way. That’s why it’s always important to keep an eye out just in case. You might reach agreements with all the established players, but new competition can quickly emerge.

So, if you don’t have any way of recognising that you’re being targeted in the first place, that will only play into the hands of others.

One thing to do regularly is check your competitors’ visibility. This can be achieved using an organic traffic research tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner or SEMRush.

Any big drop is likely to indicate a Google penalty for example and shows that they might be carry out some shady behaviour and should be watched carefully.

Alternatively, any boost in their visibility ranking might indicate that your competitors are onto something good and you should take note.

Cross referencing these stats with an algorithm monitoring tool can give you a clearer picture of what’s going on with your competitors and better enable you to act accordingly.

Catching a copycat

Duplicated content can have a damaging effect on your SEO. This is something we know all about thanks to our work carrying out technical SEO audits.

If you have content that appears in more than one place, Google won’t like it. Therefore, one shady tactic that competitors may use is to take your content and post it in random parts of the internet on other pages. This results in diminished content exclusivity and value, and ultimately lowers your rankings.

This practice is known as ‘content scraping’ and is something to keep an eye out for and prevent if at all possible. By tracking the unique identifiers of your business, you can keep on top of every mention of your brand name online and quickly identify if you’ve been a victim of content scraping.

Finding the right partner

A good way to stay on top of what your competitors are doing is to formalise your digital marketing strategy. Including competitor link analysis, SEO and PPC management within this is a great idea. Turning to experts in the field is a great way to try and prevent your competitors from getting the upper hand.

If you are interested in finding out how we can help you stay one step ahead of the competition and solidify your digital marketing campaign, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line today!