There is a chance of going overboard when attempting to mimic high-ranking competition sites. Pay attention to these SEO traps.
To boost your online visibility, you need a solid SEO strategy that includes using best practices, targeting your audience, and keeping an eye on your competitors. But be careful not to blindly copy their tactics or get too obsessed with what they’re doing. You don’t want to lose your uniqueness and harm your brand. Strike a balance between learning from them and doing what works best for your brand.
1. Brand Confusion
Ideally, you want your brand to be as unique as possible, having singular attributes and traits that make it one-of-a-kind and different from your competitors. Although in most industries there are obvious similarities that cannot be avoided when it comes to copying brand and content strategy that is a major no-no. When it comes to your brand identity and content strategy and direction (if you are producing content), you should try to be as unique as possible to avoid having brands fused in a consumer’s eyes because their brand identities are so similar. You will inevitably start to sound and appear like another brand if your strategy for developing a brand is too closely mimic its SEO. If a customer finds the site you are mimicking and gets the results they are looking for, will they even remember your brand?
2. Following Bad Tactics
In your efforts to mimic another competitor’s brand, you run the risk of following and implementing poorly designed SEO strategies and bad tactics. This can go unnoticed if you are directly copying a brand and not checking over their work. You will never be able to know the analytics behind another company, which is why directly copying is a bad idea. You have no way of knowing if the content they post is good and if the brand they are creating or already have is receptive to customers. On top of the fact that it is morally wrong to directly copy another brand’s identity, it also doesn’t go unnoticed by search engines. Google specifically crawls sites for both quality content and duplicate content and will flag your site if they find these elements.
3. Risk of Being Flagged
Following bad tactics directly relates to being flagged, suppressed, and filtered. As I mentioned in the previous section search engines notice when you are mimicking and copying other brands’ identities and content and in turn will flag, suppress or filter your content on the SERP. The ultimate goal of SEO is to rank high on the SERP for your business, but duplicating content and matching competitors’ brands will inevitably lead to punishment by search engines as you are not the original creator of the brand and its content.
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