Imagine you had a legal, clever way to steal your competitor’s customers.

What if you could get your competitors to put their customers in your sales funnel? Without spending millions on marketing, it may seem impossible.

Yet, it isn’t. The answer is brandjacking.

Brandjacking is a powerful SEO tactic. Done correctly, it can get your brand to page 1 when people search for your competitors.

If you’re not doing brandjacking, you're missing a major source of traffic and business.

What Is Brandjacking?

Brandjacking, also called “brand hijacking,” is the tactic of using another business’s brand name in your marketing. It's intent can sometimes be malicious, but when done well relies on leveraging another brand's equity to your advantage.

For the purposes of this article, we look at how brandjacking can be used in SEO to rank for terms that feature competitors. The idea is to try capture users searching for a competing brand. Here they’ll consume your content, and you can potentially convert them into a juicy sale.

Brandjacking and SEO

There are 3 steps to launch an effective brandjacking campaign.

Choose Complementary Or Competing Brands

It’s best to do brandjacking with complementary or competing brands.

• Complementary brands: Your audience often uses other products with yours. Identify these products and create content around them. Tell readers why your product compliments the products that they already use. Users who search for the complementary product may end up on your content, where you can convert them.
• Competing brands: Identify competing products. Create content, such as reviews or X vs Y comparisons, to show why your product is the better choice. If your review is well-written, objective, and adds value, you’ll be able to convert traffic into sales.

A big part of brandjacking is adding value. When you create content around complementary and competing brands, you’re providing value to a reader. 

As we know, search engines love it when we provide value.

Understand Search Intent

Understanding search intent is essential to creating content that will outrank your competition.

Search intent is the reason why a person’s searching for something online.

• Do they want to buy something, i.e. transact?
• Are they trying to get somewhere, i.e. navigate?
• Or are they doing research, i.e. informational queries?

When you understand the user’s intent, you can create content that satisfies their needs. When you meet their needs, your content will:

• Get more traffic
• Have fewer bounce rates
• Have higher engagements
• Climb through the SERPs

So, get yourself into your visitor’s shoes. 

Why did they search for an alternative product or service? What are their pain points? How can you set your product apart from the competition?

Through understanding your visitors, you’ll be able to craft better content that ranks.

Create Content That Ranks

Often easier said than done, but you need to create content that ranks. 

Semrush recently found that there are over 500 million blogs online. You won’t reach that coveted #1 spot if you create subpar content.

Here are some essentials when creating the ultimate blog post:

• Understand how long your blog post should be.
• Structure your blog post for improved engagement.
• Don’t be afraid to use blogging tools to rank your articles.

Add value to your blog posts. Be informative, to the point, and show readers why you’re the expert.

When readers value your content, search engines will rank it higher. You’ll get more traffic, better engagements, and higher conversions.

3 Brandjacking Examples

At Contentellect, we often use brandjacking as a strategy in our content writing packages. After all, we practice what we preach.

Here are 3 real-world examples of how we used brandjacking to get our clients’ content to outrank competitors.

Brandjacking Example 1: Book Like A Boss

Our client, Book Like A Boss, offers scheduling software. They compete with big, established brands such as Calendly and Acuity in a highly competitive industry.

As part of our brandjacking strategy, we created a series of blog posts that focussed on:

• Reviews: We objectively and fairly reviewed competing products.
• Comparisons: We compared Book Like A Boss Vs. Competitors, and even Competitors Vs. Competitors.
• Alternatives: We reviewed and discussed alternatives to their competitors.

Here are some of the brandjacking content that we created for them:

The results have been epic.

A quick analysis through Ahrefs shows that the brandjacking content generates hundreds of high-quality, ready-to-buy visitors monthly.

Brandjacking Example 2: Perfect Venue

Our next client is Perfect Venue. They offer event management software. We used the same strategy as we did with Book Like A Boss.

We created competitor reviews, comparisons, and alternative articles. We even created listicles with the top 10 event management software available.

Here’s an example of the brandjacking content we created:

Again, the results are impressive. Perfect Venue is consistently getting search traffic on competitor keywords.

Brandjacking Example 3: Contentellect

Naturally, we won’t suggest an SEO tactic if we don’t leverage it ourselves. 

At Contentellect, we’ve used brandjacking to review competing content writing and link building services to great effect.

Again, the same pattern is revealed. The brandjacking content outperforms our expectations and brings ready-to-transact users into our marketing funnel.

In some cases, like our popular Fat Joe review, we rank #1 in the SERPs.

Brandjacking can open a new stream of traffic to your website when used correctly.

Seal The Deal With A Clever CTA

Naturally, creating epic brandjacking content is only one part of the tactic. What’s the point of having thousands of new, eager-to-buy visitors if you don’t take advantage of it?

You must seal the deal with a clever, catchy call to action (CTA). Your CTA should be subtle yet easily visible. 

Here’s a CTA we use on our brandjacking pages:

As you can see, our CTA adds value. A juicy 30% discount and some social proof ensure we convert the visitor into a sale.

Use Brandjacking To Boost Ranking

Brandjacking is a powerful SEO tactic.

To successfully implement brandjacking into your SEO strategy, you need to:

• Identify competing and complementary brands.
• Create epic content that provides value and addresses search intent.
• Seal the deal with a subtle but value-filled CTA.

Start brandjacking today, and experience the results for yourself.

Want to learn more? See our on-page SEO checklist and off-page SEO checklist.