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A competitor is advertising with Google Adwords using my company name?

Written by Hamish Braddick on March 24th, 2010. 0 comments

Working with the Zeald marketing department I have noticed this issue on a number of occasions

Companies bid on the name of a competing company to show their Google Ads at the top of the search results. In fact it happened to Zeald on numerous occasions. I won't name names, but a number of companies were bidding on the search phrase "Zeald" and "Zeald.com" to trigger their ads for their web services.

As you might imagine, we have issue with this. It was blatently obvious these companies were trying to scrape away our valuable leads and ride on the back of our hard earned marketing dollars.

The problem with this...

We do not recommend that our clients or anyone for that matter utilise such underhanded technique with their Google Adwords Advertising. Sure there are occasions where the company name is very generic and is not really a company name anymore. FOr example "The web design company" is the name of a New Zealand company. But it is also a very generic and common search phrase. Whereas the word or name "Zeald" is a made up word and can only be associated with our company.

As a company we invest significant amounts of time effort and money into building our brand. So when people think of websites, they think of Zeald. It is a very important element of building an effective business. We spend money and effort advertising our website address and encouraging leads to visit our website. is might be newspaper ads, word of mouth, radio etc. Of course these days, most people use Google to help them find a website and will simply enter "Zeald" into Google to find us. Now when they do this and a competitors ad shows at the top, and entices a percentage of those hard won leads away from our website, our marketing department are not so happy.
The other issue is that these underhanded businesses show at the top of the results and our potential leads associate them with us which does not reflect well on our brand

Googles Adwords trademark policy

So we looked into ways that we could stop this. We discovered a great article from Google which outlines
Google's AdWords and AdSense trademark policy

In this article Google explains that they take this issue seriously and prohibit intellectual property infringement by advertisers as outlined in their AdWords Terms and Conditions . Advertisers are responsible for the keywords they choose to generate advertisements and the text that they choose to use in those advertisements.

Google Adwords trademark complaint form

However that does not of course stop some businesses from leaching from another businesses marketing spend. To enforce this Google ask that you make a formal complaint and tell them about the infringement. They provide a Google Adwords trademark complaint form that is reasonably painless to fill out.

Some important points regarding this form:

Your company name will of course need to be officially registered with the companies office and you will need to provide a registration number as proof
Google do not investigate use of trademarks as keywords in certain regions but New Zealand and Australia are on the list of countries that Google do investigate
You will need to specify exclusions if you would like to allow agencies to use your trademark to advertise on your behalf

Google do not guarantee that they will action your complaint

Once you submit your complaint, you should not hold your breath. Although the Zeald case was actioned in a few weeks, some cases are not so cut and dried. The name "Zeald" is a "made up name" and although using a made up name does not help with our SEO because it does not include important relevant search phrases like "website" or "design" it does mean that we own it and Google are sure that it belongs to us.

However if you had a company name for example "Website design company" then yes you will do well in the organic search results, however it is hard for Google to differentiate between the company name and a generic and common search phrase. Google will not allow dis-allow other Adwords advertisers from using this "Trademark" as a search phrase as it is also a very generic and common search phrase.

Topics: Google, Promotion

Designing, Building & Loading a Successful Web Site

Written by David Kelly on March 23rd, 2010. 0 comments

Web page design involves creating the look and feel of your web site. This is the step where the ‘creatives’ get involved. But, don’t get just ‘any’ graphic designer, or person you know who has a creative edge – you need someone who understands the principles of designing a web site that produces results!

Too many organisations spend a lot of money and time creating a pretty picture of their web site without considering the goals and objectives. The web page designer needs to make sure that they are designing for results. They need to keep the following things in mind:

attract and convert new customers

convince new customers to come back again

convert returning customers.

There are a number of web page design principles that are absolutely crucial if you plan on achieving a web site that works. So let’s take a look at the principles of ‘results oriented design’.

#1 Consistent Branding

The first principle is ‘consistent branding.’ Your web site must reflect the branding of the rest of your business. Many organisations have a great physical business with very strong branding, but then go online with a web site that does not reflect that branding. Make sure you leverage your branding, which you have already spent much time, resources and money on developing.

#2 Clear & Consistent ‘Navigation’

Visitors to your web site need to be able to navigate quickly to where they want to go. If you confuse your visitors and they get stuck and cannot figure out how to get to your ‘order’ page, ‘enquiry’ page or your checkout page, then you will most likely lose them. Clear and consistent navigation is strongly supported by placing important navigation elements in ‘standard navigational’ areas on the web page design. You can do this by making sure your web site is template-based.

#3 Template-based

Many people do not like even the thought of having their website based on a template! The concern we hear is, “my website will look like every other website.” What most people do not understand is that a template does not determine how a web site is going to look, but rather, it guides where the different information is going to be located on the web page.

This is truly a wonderful thing!

Think about this– when you go to a web site, you know that the company’s logo will most likely be located in the top-left corner and that you will be able to navigate the web site using either the menu at the top or left-hand side.

Imagine what it would be like if every time you jumped into a different car the controls were in different places.

Web page design templates have helped to ‘standardise’ the Web and make it a whole lot more user-friendly for the average Joe and Mary.

#4 Lots of White Space

Cluttered web sites are hard to read and navigate. It is important not to present too many different ideas on the same page. This comes down the objectives of the web site. Focus on the objectives of your web site. If you have two main objectives then focus the main “content” on the most important objective and have a smaller highlight for the other.

#5 Text-Page Links

Whenever possible try to use text-page links instead of graphic links. Search engines struggle to navigate to pages that are linked-to using a graphic. Graphical links can also be detrimental to the web site’s loading speed.

#6 Loading “Speed”

Studies have proven that if your web site takes longer than 8-10 seconds to load on a 56k modem then you run a serious risk of losing your visitor. Most web sites need to be designed to minimise the number of graphics on each ‘page’. There are many clever techniques that can be employed to keep the web page design sharp and rich without using graphical design elements. As a caution though, this principle needs to be balanced with the next principle.

#7 Professional Look & Feel

Your web site cannot look cheap! A web site has the difficult job of building trust and credibility with its visitors. If it has a cheap look to it, then ultimately it will harm your web site’s results. Make sure your web site has a sharp, professional look. It should “look” like it has had some time spent on it by a professional web site designer.

So there you have it. Zeald’s seven principles of web page design. If you have any questions about our design processes please don’t hesitate to contact the Support Team.

Topics: Web Design Tips

The Importance of Having a Clear Vision and Goal for your Web Site

Written by David Kelly on March 23rd, 2010. 0 comments

If you don't know what you are trying to achieve with your web site design then you will probably achieve … nothing!

Just as your company (hopefully) has a clear vision of where it wants to be in the future and what it wants to develop into - your web site design also needs to have a clear vision.

The vision for your web site design should be aligned with your company’s overall vision.

Ask yourself:

what is the vision for this web site design?
why are we getting a web site?
what is the purpose of your web site design?

Next, think, what are the goals for this web site design? Be specific. What do you want to achieve through a web site? Think about the following areas:

Enquiries
Sales
Brand development
Business efficiency

Put specifics on everything. How many enquiries or sales would you like to generate through your web site? What would make your web site an amazing success? Many people decide to get a web site without defining the reasons behind their decision. Once again, know exactly what you are trying to achieve!

Topics: Web Design Tips

Why measure?

Written by Hamish Braddick on March 8th, 2010. 0 comments

Remember, in order to get the best results from your website it is important that you are continually improving it. The process of continual improvement involves a continuous series of cycles. Each cycle should be made up of 3 phases and take approximately 4-6 weeks. The three phases are:

Measure > Review > Tune

Measure: You should allow at least 1 month for collecting data. (1 month)
Review: At the end of that period you then need to look back at the results to determine ways to improve the website further (1day)
Tune: Once you have determined the priorities for improving you then need to implement these (approx 2 weeks)

Without the measurement you never really know if the changes you are making to your website are improving it or actually making it worse. So the first step to start improving your results should be measuring your website's performance as it stands.

We can recommend ideas and changes to improve your website and we have plenty of articles to help you, but every website, business, target audience, industry and niche is different. Yes the more experience you have and the more you have studied best practices the more educated your ideas for improving your website will be, but no-one really knows for certain without measuring.

Incremental changes - An iterative approach

We recommend that you make the improvements to your website in small increments for each cycle.

If you make too many changes to your website and you find out later in the cycle that you are seeing a negative impact, it is a frustrating and time consuming task to determine which of the many changes is causing the negative results. Often the only way to find the problems is to wind back your changes and begin the cycle over again. We also understand that you have limited time and resource to dedicate to the website. There is only so much you can do each cycle to improve your website.

So with this in mind it is important that you focus your efforts on those changes that are hopefully going to have the greatest impact. The changes that are going to generate the greatest number of sales or leads.

We recommend that you schedule a regular period for reviewing your website results and making improvements.

How to measure effectively

With reporting and statistics, there is often too much information and it is easy to overload. We understand you probably have little time to analyse your reports, so we have designed our reports to deliver the most important stats to help you make a quick informed decision.

But still there is an art to understanding these reports, hence the purpose of this article. What you really need is a process or step by step guide to reading and understanding reports. You need to be able to quickly and easily find the problem areas to fix or the areas that are going really well which with some further improvement will provide the greatest return on investment.

Topics: Measure

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