All Content Concepts → Copycat Content
Copycat Content
Summary
“Copycat content” refers to blog posts that closely resemble the existing search results, using the same keywords, headers, and examples as the top-ranking articles. This is often driven by an over-reliance on SEO tools and keyword research.
Historically, the surest way to rank for a target keyword was to “skyscraper” the existing search results, consolidating information from across the top-ranking content—target keywords, headers, examples—into a single, ultra-long resource.
This tactic is waning in efficacy for one simple reason: competition.
Today, most competitive search results are contested by half a dozen “ultimate guides” that trade rankings back and forth with other, equally generic articles. Search strategies are informed by the same tools and the same data. Each article targets the same set of keywords, addresses the same search intent, and contains the same core information, remixed in some small way.
Even if these articles rank well, they struggle to generate business results because the experience is so generic, akin to reading a utilitarian Wikipedia page, whether the article was published by BigCommerce, or Woocommerce, or Shopify.
Today, best-in-class marketers go beyond copycat content and bring something new to the discussion in every article they publish. This “information gain” can take many shapes:
Personal experiences
Proprietary data
Contrarian perspectives
Novel formats
Explore this idea in even more detail in the post I wrote for Animalz:
Copycat Content: SEO Tools Got Us Here, Humans Will Get Us Out