Competitor names in keywords?

[gph]

A friend put together a simple site for her widget company. She asked me to check it and she's got some of her competitors names in her keywords. She said she created the keywords by looking at her competitors sites. I looked at the sites and they also have competitor names in their keywords.

Is this legal and normal? Bare in mind that this is a unique market. Using the U.S. as an example there are 2 large companies and a couple dozen small custom shops. She is in Canada and (with 15 employees) is probably the largest of a handful companies in the country. The big firms regularly pour funds into attempts to stomp out the little guys through litigation. If it isn’t legal or even questionable, she will be spending time in court.

[buckworks]

I see a cost-benefit problem here. I'd advise against it, not just for ethical reasons, but also because of SEO effectiveness issues. Few search engines put much weight on the keywords metatag these days, so unless a word which appears there is also supported by content on the visible page it is unlikely to have much effect in any case. So, why risk the wrath of the big guys by using their name(s) when there is little or maybe no benefit to be had?

My grandmother used to say, "There's no point selling your soul to the devil if you don't even get a good price for it!"

The main context I can think of where using a competitor's name might be both defensible and effective would be in an objectively verifiable compare-and-contrast review comparing their product/service and hers.

[gph]

Thanks for the insight buckworks. I told her that the words needed to appear in the page. She's doing a product comparison as you described.

Her argument for doing this is that 3 of the big company names are household. Potential clients might well use them in a search. Knowing a bit about the business I can say that she's right.

Actually having the names included in a product comparison seems to me (as a layman) to be a little more legally plausible.

[buckworks]

If you or your friend haven't done so already, I would suggest doing some research with WordTracker or the suggestion tool from one of the PPC search engines to get an idea of what terms people are using to search for the product/service. Sometimes they can be quite different from what you'd expect.

I recently gave some advice to a merchant who wanted to find ways to capitalize on his competitors' names. (I suspect that the idea was triggered by a competitor bragging about his traffic.) I raised ethical objections, but it was effectiveness, not ethics, that talked him out of it. WordTracker showed that while there were indeed several hundred searches a day for various competitors by name, there were tens of thousands of searches for variants on some "generic widget" terms where he didn't rank at all. He could see that the generic terms would be far more productive targets.

[gph]

Thanks again buckworks. I didn't know about WordTracker. I'll look into that.