Why go out of your way to craft your own SEO strategy when you can simply copy a leading competitor?

This is the mindset of many SEO’s. They do an analysis of a competitor’s backlinks and start trying to replicate those links.

Personally, I never fully understood this strategy for a few reasons that I will briefly explain.

Approaching SEO at a “Micro” Level

Analyzing your competitors’ backlinks in an attempt to replicate their exact strategies is thinking small. Don’t get me wrong, I do competitor link analyses, but I’d hardly define my strategy as trying to replicate competitor links.

Why?

SEO is rooted in universal principles and success is not defined at the niche level. A good SEO can rank a site in any niche because their strategy is fundamentally strong.

I’d prefer to look for the best link building opportunities in general vs. the best link building opportunities that my competitor already found. Sure, you may be able to find some good sites for guest posts, comments, etc, but that should only be part of your strategy.

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Straying from Core Competencies

If you’re a successful SEO, you should have a set of core competencies – areas where you can crush the competition. This may be access to a specific link network, a strong outreach process, or great press relationships.

When you assign too much weight to a competitor’s backlinks, you’re navigating away from your own core competencies and entering an arena in which your competitor excels. Furthermore, since you do not have the same resources as your competitor, you may be wasting your time.

For example, if you see that a competitor has a link from Forbes, you can clearly conclude that it’s probably a good link. That said, you may not have the resources needed to create this link on your own. In reality, you didn’t even need to do a competitive analysis to determine that a Forbes link was a good link – it’s obvious.

Leaving a Footprint

When you copy your competitors’ links exactly, you leave a footprint. I can’t comment on whether or not Google takes this into account as a ranking, but there are some obvious implications.

First, you’re leaving a footprint. If the top sites for a keyword all have links from the same URL, something looks fishy.

Second, if you follow this strategy, you will only match your competitor; you will not exceed them.

I’ve seen this phenomenon very clearly in a few mid-sized niches and it’s super obvious. I will analyze the top 5 competitors in a niche and see that they all have blog comment links from the same irrelevant post with high SEO metrics. While this may look good in your backlink analysis tool, I doubt it adds much power to your rankings.

Missing the Full Picture

When you try to replicate your competitors’ strategies, you may be missing the full picture. Forget about content quality, topical relevance, and on-site optimizations – I’m talking specifically about link building.

Many sites block SEO crawlers, meaning the backlink reports you rely on are incomplete. Take a hypothetical example where your competitor has the following links:

  • 20 Blog Comments
  • 2 Guest Posts
  • 10 PBN Links (Hidden from Crawlers)

Your backlink analysis tool will only show the following:

  • 20 Blog Comments
  • 2 Guest Posts

Link Crawler Visibility

If you try to replicate that strategy, you may find yourself replicating the lowest quality links and missing out on the best ones. Not only will you miss out on your rankings, you may actually damage your site’s backlink profile.

The Ultimate Danger

Last but not least, and the main reason I’m writing this post, you do not know how sustainable your competitor’s strategy is.

Your competitor may be killing it for months or years only to get slapped by a penalty on the next Google update. This chart illustrates the concept:

SEO Traffic Drop Off

This was a competitor I closely followed in one of my niches. The competitor had what I would define as a strong backlink profile and I would often review the site’s links for “inspiration.”

While the competitor had nice growth for months, the traffic dropped off suddenly as the site was hit with a penalty.

When you replicate someone else’s SEO strategy, you could be following a recipe for penalization. It’s much better to rely on your own strategies.

Test your own strategies, run case studies, and remain patient.