Step Wise SEO

Have you ever checked for PPC advertisers who are targeting your company name or your proprietary product names?

What you find may come as a surprise to you, especially if you haven’t been performing regular checks on these terms in the search engines.

Other advertisers may be using your targeted searches as an opportunity to display their own ads.

For example, if your business happens to make a well-known snack food, you might see an ad for a diet supplement among search results for your product.

You can read your PPC service’s terms of service to determine whether these advertisers are breaking any rules.

If you think they are, consider politely contacting the PPC service or the advertiser to let them know your interpretation of the situation.

If this type of advertising is permitted, file this knowledge under “good things to know about your search competitors.”

And beware the affiliates you never knew you had-and probably never wanted! Is your product name showing up in the ad for a shopping site?

If so, does that shopping site actually sell your product? Due to haphazard use of dynamic keyword insertion, shopping sites create ads for a specific product but deliver only a landing page saying that the product isn’t found on their website.

It doesn’t benefit you or the shopping site to let this practice continue, so if you find that you’re in the middle of a bait-and-switch PPC ad, contact the shopping site and politely request that they remove it.