Using landing page techniques to “out reputation” your competitors takes time, skill, and authority. But it can really payoff. I’ve recently looked into self-hosted video solutions for one of my clients and being the SEOMoz fanboy that I am, I first considered Wistia, their video provider of choice. I arrive at the Wistia site and was blown away by it’s minimilast design. They use an almost absurd amount of whitespace.
If “above the fold” is still the most desired area of a web page to put pertinent information on the Wistia isn’t doing the best they can. I’m not a UI expert by any means, so maybe there’s something I’m missing here but from my experience trying to convince clients that using a self-hosted video solution is best for SEO, I can only assume that Wistia runs into the same arguments: YouTube is free, it offers more exposure, commercial video solutions are too expensive etc. Their homepage should prominently feature a section to address these inquiries. Part of Wistia’s job should be to convince potential customers that using their solution is superior to a free service like YouTube. Because I couldn’t find a “case studies” section on their homepage I decided to Google “Wistia Case Studies”. This is what I was presented with.
FAIL. Their competitor Vzaar shows up instead. This is something that is completely controllable by Wistia’s marketing team. And when you scroll down, they don’t show up until the 3rd result (below the fold). And what you get isn’t a page where you can navigate to different client case studies or real life usage examples but a blog post highlighting how “Zappos Does Business” (I can assume that’s one of their customers).
Losing the “Wistia vs. Vzaar” Battle
When one of your competitors is out gaining you in search results for your own brand name it’s never a good thing. Vzaar recognizes that Wistia is a direct competitor and has created content to position itself for Wistia-related queries. Even “Wistia vs. Vzaar” provides the same results.
All they would need to do is create content to counteract Vzaar’s one landing page. The lesson here is to pepper Google and secure top spots for brand-related keywords.
Hey Clayton, you bring up a really good point here. We’ve seen a few of our competitors do things like this, and we usually ignore them. Going tit for tat and doing negative marketing isn’t really our style, but you’re right — there’s no good reason we shouldn’t play more defensively and create content to make sure this doesn’t outrank us. Thanks for the tip!
Thanks for the response Brendan. I never recommend going overboard to “outdo” the competition but if I’m doing competitor research and instead of an unbiased review I’m presented with a competitor’s pros and cons page I may know what’s going on but someone who isn’t in this vertical may be swayed by such results.
[...] consider their online reputation to be paramount in how they do business. A lot of them use various landing page tactics to out gain their competitors in niche industries like online software. When a customer researches [...]
Drupal is very powerful. I think, if some one don’t mind to make their hands dirty by tnryig to modify or write new code, Drupal is the best to create web pages.
There is nothing Drupal can do that WordPress can’t.