The "evil genius" way to STEAL customers from competitors 🩸
How to rank #1 for competitor searches
Here’s a brilliant SEO trick I’ve been seeing everywhere lately:
Create pages that ambush people looking for competitor discounts. 😈
That’s it. That’s the marketing idea.
🧪 For example:
This fake coupon page was actually created by Veed’s competitor, Speechify:
This DocuSign discounts article is from competitor BlueNotary:
LogMeIn competitor Splashtop does the same thing:
For a softer approach, create “How to pay less” pages like Chanty does:
Each page then explains why the other product is better (and cheaper).
🧠 Why does it work?
You catch customers with credit cards in hand.
When someone searches “Competitor X discount code” or “Competitor X coupon” they are showing EXTREMELY high purchase intent. They’ve already decided to buy - they’re just looking for a deal.
This creates the perfect opportunity to intercept them and say: ‘Hey, why not try our product instead?’
🛡️ The defensive play (protect yourself)
Already worried that competitors are doing this to you? You’re smart. I like you.
I covered this in my previous article (“Try this ‘secret’ discount page hack”). In short, here’s the defensive strategy:
Create your own official discount page
Rank it for “[Your brand] + coupon” searches
Outrank sketchy coupon sites AND competitor hijacks
This approach is brilliantly effective both ways:
➡️ Offensively - steal competitors’ ready-to-buy customers
⬅️ Defensively - protect your brand from discount-hunting traffic
What I love about this trick is how it targets the most valuable customers possible. We don’t have exact conversion data for these examples, but the psychology is real.
See you next week ✌️
Tom
—If you enjoyed this marketing idea, please tap the Like button below ♥️ Thank you!
Thanks to Guy Barner from Tagbox for the inspiration for this week’s marketing idea.
Yes, last year we applied this tactic at Spendbase and managed to capture the traffic for [brand + discount] keywords for hundreds of brands. They weren’t competitors though, Spendbase indeed provided partner discounts for SaaS software as a reseller. What’s worth mentioning is that the pages from Spendbase Discount Marketplace sometimes outranked the home pages of lesser known brands, which was ridiculous 😛
I don't think this demonstrates good integrity and would put me off a brand once I realised what they were doing. Always do good work. This falls short on ethics in my opinion.