would this be advisable?

[Hopedoer]

My husband has a company, that he started about 3 years ago. It is doing fairly well (he just starting working with it full time at the beginning of the year). He has done a commercial, and of course has a website.

There is the same type of company that does HEAVY advertising in our area, but they are a lot bigger then his. They have a website address that would fit both companies, for an example without giving to much detail, it would say chicagotelephoneservices. com or something like that but they are only utilizing the .com. The domain with .net and .org is still available.

I'm thinking some spill over might happen, which would benefit my husband greatly. Plus he will keep the domain he already has as well.

Would this be unethical though, being in the same city etc. COuld he get into trouble some way for using it?

Thanks for listening to my rambling, and thanks ahead of time for your advise.

[Michelle Waters]

[caleb34]

You could also do both, a domain name is a domain name. If they were smart they would capitalize on the .net and .org also. No matter what you do, the domain would have to have good seo, or it is not going to show up very well in search engine results anyway.

[Michelle Waters]

[KansasDragon]

The other reason it's a really bad idea..

You're trying to create your own brand, your own identity, not build even more name recognition for your competitor.

If you want to use your competitor's name in any way, use it when you do a side by side comparison of your offerings, compared to theirs.

Another way you could ethically use their name would be if you are using PPC, like Google Adwords. You could use their company name as one of your keywords, then when people search for their company, they will see your competing advertising also.

Absolutely 100% don't use a matching or similar domain name, it will hurt your company in the long run.

Perry Marshall has some great materials and a good white paper on creating yourself as an authority and getting leads for a brick and mortar, or industrial type company.

[Michelle Waters]

Excellent advice, KansanDragon.

And who knows -- if you don't try to take their customers, perhaps you can work together some day.

For example, in the Virtual Assistant field, many VAs will hire other VAs to handle their overflow.

Not sure if your industry does this, but it's better to keep your competitors friendly, than to start a war with them.