I was asked the other day by a client whether or not it was a good idea to go after the same links as one of their competitors.

It got me thinking about the importance of a unique online marketing strategy which I’ll discuss in more detail in this post.

Incoming links

It may seem obvious that in order to try and compete with an online rival you should just try to get links from the same websites as them. There are plenty of tools available to help you identify what sites link back to a specific domain, but there are pitfalls of looking for the same links.

For example, if an authoritative domain has already linked out to an article on “what to look out for when you hire a plumber” they may not want to link out to another article on a similar topic.

Content

Copying other people’s ideas goes on a lot when it comes to blog posts. Some will steal a headline or a topic, while others just blatantly steal entire articles word for word.

Copying ideas and content won’t work well for your business. The chances are people will switch off and not read your blog posts if it looks like something they’ve read elsewhere.

Unique content is highly value by humans and the search engines alike so don’t waste the opportunity.

Pay per click

Bidding on all the same keywords as one of your competitors in Google Adwords is a risky strategy too. Your website will be different from theirs, so while they might get a good return on a specific keyword or phrase, you may not do so well.

The best strategy is to do your own keyword research and select the words and phrases you think will work best for your business and your budget. You can then monitor these and tweak them over time.

Social media

There are lots of tools available that allow you to follow people who are already following a certain Twitter user. For example, you could just blindly follow everyone who is following your biggest local competitor.

There are a couple of problems with this approach though. First of all, your new followers could just be a bunch of spammers. And secondly, even if they’re not, you won’t be following them because you know them – Twitter should be about building relationships and not just following people because you think you should.

If you liked this article, you should also read: How to behave like a human on social media

Image credit: pkavitha1

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2012 at 8:30 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.