These predatory marketing tactics may be the biggest threat to your business

Most of us in business know enough about building search engine optimization to get by, or at least not embarrass ourselves, when the marketing team starts throwing acronyms around the boardroom. In most cases, this simply means tracking keywords, tagging social media and web sites with search terms, paying for some rankings, earning money organically, and monitoring search engine results pages to see how close you are to the top and competition.

But did you know about the dark and rapidly growing side of search engine optimization?

Even though I had been a CMO for over 20 years and used latest technologies as a practitioner and leader, I used to be unprepared for how quickly the marketing technology (MarTech) we use for good became the catalyst for so many bad events.

Recently, I used to be involved in offering marketing services to an investment fund that wanted to quickly speed up acquisition revenues. As I at all times do, I looked under the hood to understand the firms so that I could make very accurate recommendations for lead generation and sales. Something strange appeared as quickly as opening the hood of my SUV. Every company in this portfolio had the same name and very similar URL as an established competitor offering the same products in the same industries, which sent me a warning about potential trademark infringement and search engine optimization, each of which might build brands quickly and cheaply by stealing hard -earned and costly marketing profits from other firms. While I used to be aware of black hat search engine optimization and identity theft associated with phishing scams, I didn’t realize how common dark marketing tactics had develop into.

Unfortunately, in a world where good technology quickly enables bad things, monitoring brand identity and search engine optimization security must be as common as monitoring traffic, leads and conversions from marketing programs. Here are just a few actions it is best to take to protect your brand.

Brand takeover

Brandjacking is greater than just creating a fake website for a big brand like Norton or Netflix and then telling customers to update their payment information, which is then stolen by the thieves behind the fake web sites. It’s also about branding a business with a similar identity and URL to one other business to mislead customers as to who is who, with the intention of driving consumers looking for competitor sites to your site. Many consumers and algorithms don’t know the difference between URLs that are almost equivalent. When this happens, the money and effort you place into managing keywords, tagging sites, creating content, paying for Google Ads, and more can actually profit a dark competitor who is doing nothing greater than redirecting other people’s web traffic to their very own sites.

You can often spot a potential brand takeover when a competitor comes along with a name and URL very similar to yours. Compare ABCtechnologies.com and ABCtechnologies1.com. Algorithms can miss minor differences and serve fake URLs to targeted customers, no matter how much you spend on search engine optimization.

What you would like to do to protect yourself

1. Constantly monitor the URLs in your space and concentrate to people who are very similar. You can do this by regularly checking your brand’s SERP and logging into hosting firms’ web sites to see what similar URLs are getting used. If you discover similar URLs, try to discover company executives you’ll be able to contact regarding trademark rights. If there is malicious intent, you most likely won’t find the names of executives on the website or social media.
2. Pay attention to a brand that reflects yours. There may be greater than one company named ABC Technologies, LLC, which does not necessarily indicate intent to commit wrongdoing. If there is an overlap in the products and industries served and signs of brand name confusion, there are several sites where you’ll be able to check where they are registered and who the agents are.
3. If you watched you are the victim of intentional trademark and/or search engine optimization infringement, you’ll be able to take legal motion against the brand to ensure they are not confusing their goal customers and poaching your sales in addition to your identity.

Is your search engine optimization at risk of theft?

You may have read a story on Entrepreneur.com last June about the great “SEO heist” of 2023 and how the agency behind it boasted that it had stolen over 3.6 million traffic visits from its competitors in a matter of months. This announcement sparked a stormy response: some unscrupulously wanted to do it themselves, while others were outraged by the proven fact that artificial intelligence, automation and other tools were getting used for outright theft. I’ll at all times side with the latter. search engine optimization heists often involve removing website menus and links, duplicating blog URLs and landing pages, engaging artificial intelligence to write articles containing keywords that support the stolen content, and more. Consumers don’t at all times know the difference and may think they bought from you when as a substitute they were buying from a hijacker they shouldn’t trust.

Fortunately, these threats are being disclosed, but that does not imply business managers are willing to protect their branding and search engine optimization efforts from online pirates. Here are three ways to determine if your search engine optimization is at risk of theft.

1. Constantly monitor traffic on your website. If you notice unexplained declines despite no change in behavior on your part, you may develop into the victim of a seizure.
2. Go to content pages from brands with names and URLs similar to yours and see how similar their content, third-party links, and landing page URLs are to yours. Attention. Report any suspicions to Google, which must discover black hatters using its platform and disable algorithms accordingly.
3. Check with Google to see if they’ve detected any abnormalities in web traffic and redirects for your backlinks. Report any suspicious issues to Google. Here abstract some of the actions Google takes to ensure a fair and secure search engine optimization environment.

Marketing technology makes whitehat, ethical and earned, paid and organic search engine optimization easier to achieve, execute and monitor than ever. There are many ways to monitor the impact of your keywords and those of your competitors in a fair, ethical and legal manner. You can read about these low-cost tactics in the latest book Entrepreneurs: “Market Your Business – Your Guide to DIY Marketing.”, available on amazon.com, bn.com and more. There is never a reason to resort to black hat search engine optimization. In fact, the campaign mentioned in the “SEO Heist” article mentioned above crashed — and crashed hard. According to this text regarding LinkedIn and others, the long-term damage was greater than the gain.

Artificial intelligence provides many powerful tools to make marketing and development initiatives work higher and faster. But it is also a great example of failure turning into success. The failure is that this technology can be used for nefarious activities, and there are many who will do so. By following the steps in this text, you’ll be able to recognize the problems and fix them yourself.