My client Jane runs a blog focused on DIY home decor ideas. She wanted to improve her traffic and asked me for help with SEO and content strategy.

I analyzed Jane’s top competitors and found several sites with popular content on DIY home decor. One competitor had a post ranking #1 for “DIY living room decor ideas”. I suggested Jane create a similar piece of content but optimize it for the keyword “DIY family room decor ideas”. The family room is another term for living room, so many of the same tips and ideas would apply.

Jane wrote and published the new blog post, and we began to actively build links to drive rankings in search engines. Within 6 months, her new post had climbed to position #3 for the target keyword “DIY family room decor ideas” and was generating over 500 new visitors per month from that post alone.

Encouraged by this success, I continued to analyze competitors’ content for more keyword opportunities. Another competitor had a post on “wall stenciling ideas for bedrooms”. We replaced “bedrooms” with “bathrooms” to target “wall stenciling ideas for bathrooms”. Again, Jane created a new post optimized for this phrase.

Over the next year, Jane published more than 20 new blog posts based on keywords we had “stolen” from competitors by making minor replacements to high-ranking pages. Her overall organic traffic grew by over 75% as these new keyword-focused pages rose in rankings and drove more visitors.

Some tips I gave Jane:

• Closely analyze competitors’ top content to find individual pages worth replicating. Look for posts with many backlinks and social shares as these tend to rank well.
• Make only small changes to the keyword by replacing one or two important terms. Don’t completely reword the phrase.
• Create genuinely useful content that provides value to readers. Don’t just churn out thin content for the new keywords.
• Build quality backlinks to the new content from authoritative sites to help improve search rankings. Social shares also help.
• Keep monitoring search performance and traffic for each new page. Double down on pages receiving the most traffic to keep building links and improving rankings.
• Continue expanding into more related keyword areas over time. Don’t stop at only one round of optimizations. Keep keyword copycat!

This strategy worked very well for Jane’s DIY home decor blog. By leveraging competitors’ top content as inspiration, we were able to generate many new keyword opportunities that ultimately drove substantial increases in organic search traffic and rankings. The results speak for themselves!

Does this case study demonstrate how keyword copycat from competitors can be an effective long-term SEO strategy? Let me know if you have any other questions.