Trademarks and Pay Per Click Advertising Tim Higgins

I get a lot of questions from clients about the practice of buying completive keywords that are trademarked. For example, you work for a company called Widget and your company has registered a trademark on that name.

You then go to Google and type in Widget and there on the right-hand side in the paid advertising column are your competitors. They have purchased the keyword Widget and are displaying ads in an attempt to leverage your brand into their business.

This is actually perfectly fine and permitted by all search engines. In fact it is a great strategy and I recommend all our clients buy their own trademarked term if you see competitors buying it. In many cases, your organic listing could get trumped if there are competitors lurking in the paid column.

Now, what you need to watch is if competitors are using your trademark in their ad text. If your competitor uses “Widget” in the ad text of their ad, then you can ask the search engine to turn them off and most search engines will.

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