Should I Try to Rank for a Competitor's Brand in Google?

[Jared]

Is it worth going after brand-name website keywords?

Let me give you an example.

In politics, there's a site called Conservative Treehouse. According to ahrefs, their brand name gets almost 200,000 monthly searches -- not too shabby. The competition score is very low (single digits). There are dozens of similar sites with low competition and xx,xxx and xxx,xxx monthly searches.

Are these keywords worth going after, or does the presumed searcher intent and SERP-hogging sitelinks devalue them to the point they're not worth it?

Thanks.

 

[bernard]

Is it worth going after brand-name website keywords?

Let me give you an example.

In politics, there's a site called Conservative Treehouse. According to ahrefs, their brand name gets almost 200,000 monthly searches -- not too shabby. The competition score is very low (single digits). There are dozens of similar sites with low competition and xx,xxx and xxx,xxx monthly searches.

Are these keywords worth going after, or does the presumed searcher intent and SERP-hogging sitelinks devalue them to the point they're not worth it?

Thanks.

I have made more than a few sales from people googling the advertiser to check if they're legit. I have a "Brand" page for each vendor where I show their ratings on various platforms (Facebook etc), along with a feed generated search engine to find current offers. Then some more background info etc, history of the brand and so on. It's not a big hitter, but it has given enough sales to be worth the effort. In addition, I did it to increase trust and relevancy, since brand keywords are always linked in Google to more general keywords.

 

[Poplanu]

Is it worth going after brand-name website keywords?

Let me give you an example.

In politics, there's a site called Conservative Treehouse. According to ahrefs, their brand name gets almost 200,000 monthly searches -- not too shabby. The competition score is very low (single digits). There are dozens of similar sites with low competition and xx,xxx and xxx,xxx monthly searches.

Are these keywords worth going after, or does the presumed searcher intent and SERP-hogging sitelinks devalue them to the point they're not worth it?

Thanks.

Do you mean ranking for the keyword "conservative treehouse"? Someone searching for that is looking for the latest conservative news to read from their favorite website. Not likely you'll outrank. You might land a #2-4 position in best case scenario, but because of the intent, I'd assume that most people are clicking through on the first result.

Options are:

• Conservative treehouse review
• Is conservative treehouse X?
• How does conservative treehouse X?
• etc.

But I'd be more worried about monetization with those, the traffic is likely not worth the effort. Unless you have your own conservative news website or email list where you can push them.

Otherwise, it depends on the keyword and the intent of the searcher. If TCTH is ranking for some term, and you know you can do a better article on the topic and build more/better links to it, why not go for it. If you have ahrefs you can see their top pages by traffic, so I'd start from there.

 

[Simon D]

Is it worth going after brand-name website keywords?

Let me give you an example.

In politics, there's a site called Conservative Treehouse. According to ahrefs, their brand name gets almost 200,000 monthly searches -- not too shabby. The competition score is very low (single digits). There are dozens of similar sites with low competition and xx,xxx and xxx,xxx monthly searches.

Are these keywords worth going after, or does the presumed searcher intent and SERP-hogging sitelinks devalue them to the point they're not worth it?

Thanks.

It all depends on searcher intent. The search "conservative treehouse" is navigational - people just want to visit that website.

I have a few ecommerce clients and we always build brand pages. Lots of them are ranked #2 or #3 under the brand's official site and occasionally we have even outranked them for terms like "brandname Australia" or even just for brandname with the local relevance (Australian site outranking the .com locally). Even still, we get a very low percentage of the clicks because generally people are looking for the official site. Not to say you shouldn't do it, but if you see 2,000 searches for a term don't expect to get 200 clicks in position 3, it's more like 1-2%.