Why SEO copying isn't a thing
As a premise, copying any business’ strategy should never be the ideal approach. It doesn’t work offline and it will not work online.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence, which uses PR methods to grow a link portfolio and North Star Inbound, which is a recommended agency for penalty recovery. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.
Within SEO, there is a lot of focus on what the competition is doing, and I think this is an obvious outgrowth of an obsession over rankings. If your primary SEO KPI is where you are on search rankings, that inevitably considers who might be above and below you.
Removing the element of competition from the SEO strategy will be freeing for most sites. Let’s dig into this:
You can’t copy businesses
First, as a premise, copying any business’ strategy should never be the ideal approach. It doesn’t work offline, and it will not work online.
Just look at categories like ride-sharing, where Uber dominates outside the US because Lyft is primarily US-only. If copying a business were so easy, Lyft could “copy" itself and replicate its model globally. As reality shows, a lot more goes into a successful operation than just an idea.
[SPONSORED by Search Intelligence]
We built 300 PR links for his betting client, and their visibility exploded on Google.
But it’s not just our links that made their website chart look like NVIDIA stock.
Links in some of the world's largest publications: NBC, NY Post, Express, Mirror, and hundreds more.
This is in addition to the super-relevant links they are also building via other methods.
SEO is changing.
Link building is changing.
Or, for a more straightforward business, imagine for a moment that you were in a dog-walking business, and your sole business strategy was to poach all of your competitors' customers. This might give you an initial surge of business from people who were either on the fence about their current dog walker or your approach to being better than the competition—whether it's a discounted price or other value-added—but it is not sustainable without many different factors.
The initial surge of business doesn’t account for many of the human or environmental aspects that are endemic to every business. Personalities differ, affinity for specific work changes, and, of course, there is chemistry between customer and provider.
As another point, I was chatting with a startup in the AI space via an Intro call, and they were keen to jump the gun on SEO. I recommended they pour all their desired SEO spend into their product. Eventually, the dust will settle on AI tools, and the winners will be those companies with a winning product and not those with the best rankings on Google. CAC and ARR are the metrics that will win the day, not rankings and impressions.
It’s about the emotion
A business relationship is like any human relationship; it can’t be copied precisely with the exact same results.
(Since some of you will email about physical product clones, I will address that too. If a product can be cloned offshore and undercut the original creator, the challenge is not the clone; the only value the customer sees in the product is the utility. The solution is brand building, so customers want the original even if it’s more expensive.)
The same factors are at play when referring to an SEO strategy. Many times, when one website tries to clone another’s SEO strategy, it will only focus on keywords or backlinks. While keywords and backlinks are critical factors in positioning a website in search results, they are only the tip of the iceberg in precise rankings.
Brand matters
What lies beneath the surface are elements that are impossible to clone or, in many cases, even know about. These will include the age of a website (I am not saying this alone is a factor, but it is a driver of link velocity and user engagement signals in a search engine’s history of a site). Additionally, many search results are driven by brand signals, which are always tricky to quantify.
In many cases, these unquantifiable brand signals will contribute to search engine positioning that is unexplainable by standard search inputs. For example, my website outranks LinkedIn for my own name. Of course, I don’t have better signals on my website than Linkedin or the other authority websites that rank beneath my own site; however, Google has perceived my site as the brand for my name, so my website is in that first slot.
All of these unknowable and invisible signals that contribute to a website’s footprint are just as important as the visible components that can be replicated by running a gap analysis in an SEO tool.
Visibility is more than one thing
To reiterate a website’s SEO channel is the sum of all factors and not just the content, structure and links. For this reason, I and other SEO consultants I know don’t shy away from working with direct competitors simultaneously - with permission and disclosure, of course. While there are considerations around trade secrets and confidentially, any company can take another’s precise SEO strategy and still not see the same results. The success or failure of the strategy also has inputs from the product, customers, and employees, which can never be the same across multiple companies.
This is why I like using the word organic when referring to SEO traffic, as it results from a natural confluence of inputs. Just like you can never reproduce a perfect human or even a plant, search can never be precisely engineered, no matter how hard you try.
Instead of copying another company, the best option is to build your own strategy, which begins with a thorough process of developing a buyer’s journey around your own customers.
Understand the user
It might entail coming up with personas or customer avatars and then building out the journey for those customers. This would include more than ideating what search terms they might use; they should also consider whether they are the types of people who use a search engine and if they are using which particular search engine.
As you develop buyers’ journeys and SEO strategies, you will arrive at a completely different place and strategy than you would have had you simply copied the competition.
The best, of course, is that copying the competition might be enough to sell the competition's products, but building your own strategy will be exactly what you need to sell to your specific customers that fits like a glove with your organization and brand.
[Sponsored by North Star Inbound ]
This is the exact playbook we ran for a dental client.
In a few short months, the results was:
$139,801 in revenue.
Old SEO playbook:
Create 1000s of pages and rank for millions of keywords.
Alienate users with mass-produced content.
Buy links, run link exchanges, scale your guest posting to boost your rankings so more people can check out the bad mass-produced pages.
New SEO playbook:
Create 100 pages that are best in class, help users solve their problems, honestly present various solutions, and position you as a great option.
Keep those pages up to date be refreshing content regularly.
Create original research and thought leadership content that builds your brand while attracting journalists who want to write about your content.
People who find your pages organically immediately feel served by the content and develop a positive association with your brand. They convert at a higher level or place you on a shortlist.
Get your New SEO Playbook.