About the Author
Corey is the owner and President/CEO of Voltage. He has spent 18 years working in strategic and leadership roles focused on growing national and local client brands with award-winning, ROI-generating digital strategies. He's a recent recipient of the KCDMA 2019 Marketer of the Year award.
SEO is a unique digital marketing channel and discipline. As Bruce Clay told me 15 years ago, it is a process of getting your site and content and whole presence to be considered “least imperfect” in the interpretation of the search engines. I also heard Will Reynolds talk about the unique nature of SEO being something done in public compared to other marketing channels and disciplines.
Those two perspectives are spot on in my opinion. A lot of what we do in SEO is looking at competitors and trying to reverse engineer or determine what factors Google is using to rank them favorably and at the top of the search engine results pages. That’s definitely a worthwhile activity and is important to get a sense of what context, intent, and signals Google deems topically relevant and authoritative for certain topics and subject matter that matter to both our competitors and to us.
However, it is critically important what we do with that information. There are specific dangers in misusing what we see others doing and putting it into our own strategies and websites blindly.
Go with me on a deeper dive on specific dangers to make sure you don’t cross the line. Check out my full article on 8 dangers of copying another brand’s SEO on Search Engine Land.