SEO Copying Pitfall #5: Are Your Marketing Efforts Similar to the Ones Copied

Another problem with copying the competition’s search engine optimization strategies is that it might set up false pretenses for site visitors.  If you copy strategies that have different goals, chances are you’ll either anger or confuse visitors and not receive the quality traffic desired. 

For example, let’s pretend a competitor is looking to hit well for a particular target market in a geographic region.  Copying the SEO tactics outright would be configured for a particular area which doesn’t work if a different area is the target.  However, many people do this.  They quickly copy information without paying close attention to what they are doing.  The reward is a site that hits well for an area 5 states over but since it’s outside of their market, any traffic is generally worthless.

This is an obvious oversight but there are subtle ones too.  A common one with geographic settings is that people will copy it and change the information for their locale.  The problem occurs when they ship globally.  They optimize a site for a set area but in reality they service clients globally.  This just limits what they are optimized for.  This is not a glaring error but certainly a decision that will limit traffic and potential sales or leads.

At the end of the day, it boils down to knowing what your website goals are.  If you define those and apply SEO tactics to increase the rate of traffic that has a high probability of meeting that goal, your site will produce.  If you don’t know your goals, or ignore them to copy from someone else, there will be problems.  Either it won’t work at all or the traffic generated won’t be an appropriate group which will lead to worthless traffic, or none at all.