Most of us in the business know enough about construction SEO to make it or at least not get embarrassed when the marketing team starts throwing acronyms around the conference room. For most, it's just keeping up keywordstagging social media pages and websites with query terms, paying for some rankings, more organic earnings and monitoring search engine results pages to see how close you are to the top and your competitors.

But do you know about the dark and fast growing side of SEO?

Despite over 20 years as a marketing leader who embraces new technologies as a practitioner and thought leaderI was unprepared for how quickly the marketing technology (MarTech) we use for good became the catalyst for so much evil.

Recently, I was involved in providing marketing services to an investment fund that wanted to accelerate income quickly for purchase. As I always do, I looked under the hood to understand businesses so I could create highly relevant recommendations for lead generation and sales. Something strange came up as quickly as the hood appeared on my SUV. Every company in this portfolio had the same name and a very similar URL as an established competitor offering the same products in the same verticals, sending me a potential trademark alert and SEO Violation, both of which can build brands quickly and cheaply by stealing hard-earned and costly marketing returns from other companies. While aware of black hat SEO and related identity theft phishing scamsI was unaware of how common shady marketing tactics have become.

Unfortunately, in a world where good technology quickly enables bad deeds, monitoring your brand identity and SEO security should be as common as monitoring traffic, leads and conversions from your marketing programs. Here are just a few actions to take to protect your brand.

Related: 'We pulled an SEO heist': This entrepreneur stole 3.6 million pageviews from competitors — and your business could be next.

Brandjacking

Brandjacking is more than creating a fake site 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 sites. It's also about branding a business with a similar identity and URL to another business to confuse customers about who's who with the goal of directing consumers looking for competitors' websites to your site. Many consumers and algorithms don't know the difference between URLs that are almost identical. When this happens, the money and effort spent on managing keywords, tagging sites, creating content, paying for Google Ads and more can actually benefit an obscure competitor who does nothing but divert traffic. of the Internet earned by others on their sites.

You can often spot potential brand fraud when a competitor appears with a name and URL that are very similar to yours. Compare ABCtechnologies.com with ABCtechnologies1.com. Algorithms can miss small differences and serve up fraudulent URLs to your target customers, no matter how much you spend on SEO.

What you should do to protect yourself

1. Constantly monitor the URLs in your space and notice any similar ones. You can do this by frequently checking the SERPs for your brand and visiting hosting companies' sites to see what similar URLs are being retrieved. If you find similar URLs, try to identify company executives who you can contact regarding your trademark rights. If there is malicious intent, you likely won't find the names of the drivers on the site or on social media.
2. Pay attention to the brand that reflects yours. There may be more than one company named ABC Technologies, LLC, and this does not necessarily indicate intent to commit wrongdoing. If there is overlap in products and industries served and signs of brand confusion, there are several sites you can use to see where they are registered and who the agents are.
3. If you suspect you are a victim of intentional trademarking and/or SEO violationyou can take legal action against that brand to make sure they don't confuse your target customers and control your sales in addition to your identity.

Is your SEO at risk of being stolen?

You may have read the story here Entrepreneur.com Last June about the great SEO Heist of 2023 and how the agency behind it bragged about stealing more than 3.6 million traffic hits from a competitor over a few months. There has been a flurry of reactions to this announcement, some unscrupulously wanting to do it themselves and others disgusted that AI, automation and other tools are being used for outright theft. I will always stick with the latter. SEO heists often involve scraping your website's menu and links, duplicating URLs for blogs and landing pages, engaging AI to write keyword-laden articles that support your stolen content, and more. Customers don't always know the difference and may think they bought from you when instead they bought from a scammer they shouldn't trust.

Thankfully, these threats are being exposed, but that doesn't mean business managers are prepared to defend their branding and SEO efforts against Internet hackers. Here are three ways to determine if your SEO is at risk of being stolen.

1. Continuously monitor your website traffic. If you see unexplained drops despite no change in behavior on your part, you may be the victim of a robbery.
2. Go to brand content pages with similar names and URLs to yours and see how closely their content, third-party links, and landing page URLs mimic yours. Take note. Report any suspicions to Google, which is committed to identifying black hats using its platform and closing algorithms accordingly.
3. Check with Google to see if they detect any anomalies in your web traffic and redirects for your backlinks. Report any suspected issues to Google. Here is one Briefing of some actions Google takes to ensure a fair and safe SEO environment.

Related: 9 SEO tips to help you rank #1 on Google in 2024

Marketing technology makes whitehat, ethical and paid and earned Organic SEO easier to achieve, execute and monitor than ever. There are many ways to track the impact of your keywords and those used by your competitors in a fair, ethical and legal way. You can read about these affordable tactics in Entrepreneur's new book, Showcase Your Business – Your Guide to DIY Marketing, available at amazon.com, bn.com and more. There is never a reason to resort to black hat SEO. In fact, the campaign mentioned in the “SEO Heist” article mentioned above crashed – and crashed TOUGH. According to this article on LinkedIn and others, the long-term harm was greater than the gain.

AI offers many powerful tools to make marketing and growth initiatives work better and faster. But it's also a great example of failure to succeed. The downside is that this technology can be used for nefarious activities, and there are many who will. By following the steps in this article, you can prepare to recognize problems and correct them.