Competitor Keyword Bidding: How Smaller Brands Can Benefit From the Big Players

In a tactic referred to as Competitor Keyword Bidding, businesses can reverse the competitive advantage of larger and more popular businesses in order to leverage the competitor’s market share to improve their own exposure.

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    Search engine optimization encompasses a wide range of strategic marketing tactics that your team can employ in order to help placement of your brand in search engine results pages (SERP). However, there’s also value in the SEO tactics around keyword research that can be leveraged in other ways, especially in paid search and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns. In buying advertising to display when certain keywords are searched, brands often target keywords that support their brand, describe a service or product they offer, or relate to the value and experience offered by the brand.

    An alternative approach to keyword bidding has become quite popular in recent years with marketers. In a tactic referred to as Competitor Keyword Bidding, businesses can reverse the competitive advantage of larger and more popular businesses in order to leverage the competitor’s market share to improve their own exposure. To give readers a better idea of how they can use this tactic of Competitor Keyword Bidding to their advantage, we’re going to break down how keyword strategies can be modified to target the activities of competitors and provide some insight into the benefits and risks of doing so.

    The Google Keyword Bidding Process

    When designing and launching pay-per-click campaigns with search engines like Google, it’s necessary to provide the service with certain information that will determine when your advertisement shows up. Part of this process is choosing keywords associated with your brand’s product or service. These keywords, when included in a user-generated search, act as triggers to let Google and other search engines know they should play ads associated with those keywords. However, it’s not as simple as just paying a flat fee to be a featured ad for those keywords.

    The search engine algorithms measure your organization’s quality score relative to those terms as part of the ranking process. The other part of that process is based on the max dollar amount you’ve bid towards that keyword. You have to then establish a cost per click (CPC) that you’re willing to pay in order to have your ad appear, which becomes your bid. The search will trigger the assessment algorithm and brands who have bid higher on that search term and have a higher quality score relative to that term will win out and be featured on the resulting search engine results page (SERP).

    Combining Bids and Ads into Campaigns

    A properly structured PPC campaign is made up of several groupings of keywords and ads. Each component of the PPC should have a different goal or purpose. This means that the bids and keywords can vary greatly within a given campaign, ensuring that your ads are seen across a wide variety of SERPs.

    Bidding on a Budget

    When you establish your PPC campaign and bid on your keywords, you establish your spending budget upfront. You can make adjustments to your various bids on keywords, but rather than adding funding to the campaign, it reallocates spend to the new bids. While this might shorten the life of the campaign, it can make the campaign much more strategic and effective if you can secure ad placement relative to a higher quality keyword. The bid adjustment process can be set to manual for more seasoned professionals or it can be set to automatic, with built-in bidding strategies such as to maximize clicks, maximize conversions, and other strategies based on the goals of the campaign.

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    Going on the Offensive with Competitor Keyword Bidding

    The goal in keyword bidding is generally to bid on the keywords that you score highest on as a brand or service, based on your website, blog, social media sites, and other components of your online real estate. We say “generally” because there are other, more aggressive bidding tactics that you can employ in your efforts to maximize your Google Ads keyword campaign performance and improve lead conversion.

    How To Execute a Competitor Keyword Bidding Strategy

    At the heart of this approach is a shift in the keywords that your digital marketing team should be placing bids on. Rather than a campaign built around keywords specific to your services and brand, you should instead be targeting your competition directly with keywords related to their brand name as well as their products and services. This approach can be tricky and possibly expensive, but if done correctly, can net your business huge success and an influx of qualified leads. Let’s go through some of the things you should do to establish a competitor-based keyword campaign.

    Be Extremely Cautious and Intentional with Your Keyword Bids

    We mentioned above the ability to automate the bidding process based on your campaign’s goals. This is not an advisable strategy when targeting your competitor directly, as it can result in a brand bidding war that, left to the machines and algorithms, can spiral quickly and drain the remaining budget of your keyword campaign. The best approach is to choose relevant keywords that are the cheapest and easiest to attain that will give you the most value for the money that you’re investing.

    Offer Better Deals and Pricing

    The whole goal of a Competitor Keyword Targeted campaign is to show that you can provide a better value for potential customers. Research the competitor’s ads and listings and tailor your ads for this campaign to highlight that you can provide products or services at a lower price point and offer better coupons or savings than they have on offer. The goal is to entice the searcher to click on your ad, and the best way to do that is to offer a better deal.

    Create Stronger Messaging and Ad Copy for Your Listing

    There’s a power in the words we use in marketing and advertising that often gets lost in our efforts to keep it short and efficient. Study your competitors’ listings for products, their advertisements, and even the listing that appears when you search them in a search engine. Create copy and display URLs that make your brand stand out. Your goal here is to create a better-looking advertisement than the competition. Even if it doesn’t result in a click directly, you’re exposing the searcher to your brand and increasing brand awareness and recognition.

    One thing to watch out for in competitor targeting is actually including the targeted keywords in your ad copy, or even the competitor’s brand name, copyrighted logo, branded terms, or trademarked content. This could not only cause legal issues but also skew search results and reduce the chances of your ad showing at all.

    It does you no good to create a competitor-focused keyword campaign with incredibly effective and enticing offers if the landing page they are redirected to is poorly designed or isn’t in line with the searcher’s expectations. If your ads have a high click-through rate (CTR), but your landing pages have high bounce rates and you see other metrics such as low conversion rates or low CTR on your landing page, your marketing team should reassess the targeted audience and ensure that your offers and ad copy meet that audience’s needs. Improving the quality of your landing pages will reduce bounce rates and improve conversion rates.

    Develop Your Competitor Keyword Campaign Strategy Today

    For smaller businesses looking to improve organic results on SERPs, the SEO advertising landscape can be an extremely challenging and competitive terrain to successfully navigate. Leveraging a strategy like a competitive keyword bidding campaign, smaller organizations can use the larger organizations’ successes and tactics to their own advantage by targeting related keywords and running ads against those keywords so that for a lower cost, smaller businesses can get as much or more visual exposure and generate more qualified leads.