Occasionally I get asked about using the names of competitors in keywords to assist in generating qualified leads in the search engines. While I haven't seen a court case addressing the issue of using your competition in the keywords specifically, recently there have been several court cases involving pay per click keywords.

For example, Geico sued Google because Google would let any company use Geico as a keyword in a pay per click campaign. That means if someone does a search for Geico, a competitor's ad will show up along with the legitimate company thereby diverting traffic from Geico.

The reasoning is that consumers will get confused if they are doing a search for one company and come up with another. There is also the issue of using a trademarked name like Geico in an effort to divert their potential customers.

And, even though Yahoo has decided not to allow advertising based on trademarked names, Google has not taken such a hard line. The result: Yahoo buys advertising from Google to generate site traffic with trademarked names of competitors. As an example a well known dating site is now suing Yahoo because Yahoo has purchased advertising to compete against this site in Google.

In short, it's risky at best to use your competitor's trademarked name in your web keywords and pay per click campaigns. I think as the web becomes a stronger marketing tool we'll continue to see more of these types of law suits.

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