Just like with school students, plagiarism reflects badly on a company.  Taking some title tags, keywords, or meta descriptions isn’t going to be noticed by the user, copying a competitor’s site and just changing the name, logo, and photos will.  A common pitfall people make when copying SEO is they don’t know where to draw the line.  This frequently happens when people try to match the competition but have no idea what to look for.  Rather than trial and error, research, or consulting they take everything for fear they’ll miss the key component.  After a few modest design changes, the site goes live.  This is a very bad idea.

Let’s set aside copyrights or lawsuits as a reason not to do this, though it  is a distinct possibility when stealing copy or design from another company.  Instead let’s focus on how the user reacts.  If you manage to pull this technique off and improve your rank to the same as your competitor you will likely be viewed one after the other.  Since your competitor has a leg up, in that they actually know what they are doing, it’s fair to assume they will always be placed a spot or two above you.  So your competitor is viewed, then you.  A mirror image of the site before, but probably with some flaws.  That’s not the way to present yourself on the web, a cheap knockoff of a competitor. 

By all means use competitive intelligence to your advantage but do it knowledgeably and ethically.  Anything else will either hurt your company or get you in to a lot of trouble.

The most common mistake people make with the copy the competition’s strategy is they find the competition the wrong way.  The way it should be done is to search keywords you’d like to rank for in a couple different search engines and see who ranks best.  Then take the top three or four and duplicate some of the effective tactics they display.

Unfortunately, a common way of doing this is to type in the nearest and best known competition and start copying.  The problem is you have no idea how or if their website ranks.  You might be copying the worst ranked site on the web for all you know.  Unless you found out that your nearest competition hired the best search engine optimization company in town, don’t start with them.  Let the search engines point you to the competition that’s doing it best.  If your nearest competition still comes up in that list, feel comfortable that you will be using their valuable tactics, not junk they put on the web.

A common piece of advice for improving a sites rank is for the owner to spy on their competition’s SEO tactics and duplicate what they see so they will rank well.  While this can be a great idea if the spy can analyze what they are seeing and critically choose what makes sense, it can be disastrous for someone that blindly emulates.

In my upcoming posts, I will lay out 6 ways this strategy can be detrimental and some ways to avoid making these search engine optimizing mistakes.

There are major supporters of search engine optimization and a fair number of people that claim it’s web snake oil, nothing but smoke and mirrors to sap unsuspecting victims’ wallets. I think the latter stance is quickly losing ground as more and better SEO tactics place websites at the top of search engines and help generate traffic. However, there is one pitfall to all those wonderful SEO techniques. They need a solid foundation of content to be effective.

Typically people that discover SEO want to jump in headfirst and be at the top of search engines yesterday. To say nothing of the finesse necessary to optimize a site, jumping right in often doesn’t work because they don’t have a valuable site yet. It’s a cobbled together group of “common links” with little to no points of interest. Unless you want the site optimized for the key word “boring” some development probably has to precede SEO techniques. Content is always king and given a choice between the best optimizing techniques and good content on a site, I’ll take content every time. Start optimizing by putting some TLC into your site, update it, make it more interactive, and then use the fancy techniques because all the SEO in the world won’t make a bad site interesting.

 – Eric
www.emarketinginnovation.com