This is a question we get asked more then you’d think, usually with a little giggle attached, like the person asking already knows its kind of a shady move. Can you rank for your competitors business name on Google? Technically yeah. Should you? Thats a different conversation entirely.
Honestly if you do SEO the right way, sometimes you’ll naturally show up when people search a competitors name, not because your trying to steal there traffic on purpose, but because Google just doesnt have enough good results to fill the page. We’ve literally seen this happen with orthodontist clients, they’ll show up on page one for a competitors name just because Google’s like well I dont have much else to show here, might as well throw this guy in too.
But intentionally targeting competitor names with paid ads, thats a whole different beast, and honestly we think its kind of a gross practice.
Heres a real story that happened to someone we know. She needed to call ADP, which is a pretty well known HR and payroll software. She googled ADP, clicked the first result which was a paid ad, except it wasnt actually ADP, it was a completely different HR company running ads targeting that search term. She spent an hour and a half stuck in there phone tree, got transferred a million times, finally got a supervisors supervisor, and just lost it on the poor guy. All because she clicked a paid ad that hijacked the brand name she was searching for.
Is that really worth it for the company running those ads? Sure maybe they get a few confused clicks but at what cost? Now you got a bunch of angry, confused people calling your business who never actually wanted to talk to you in the first place. Thats not a lead, thats a headache.
We actually turned off alot of our own Google ads because of a similar issue, AI enhanced targeting kept sending our ads to people searching for completely different companies, like literally people searching “GoDaddy login” ending up on our ads. We added negative keywords, tried to fix it, and Google just kept turning that setting back on because apparently thats more profitable for them.
So our take, dont chase traffic that was never looking for you in the first place. It might work short term but it usually just creates more problems then it solves, and eventually the market tends to sort these things out anyway.
