Timeless Quotes From SEO Experts to Apply to Your SEO Campaign
"SEO is not about being the best. It's about being better than you were yesterday." - Rand Fishkin
"The best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google search results." - Unknown
"Content is king, but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants." - Jonathan Perelman
"Good SEO work only gets better over time. It's only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change." - Jill Whalen
"The goal of SEO is not to rank #1. The goal is to generate leads and sales for your business." - Adam Audette
Copy cat content: Seo Tools
Increasingly, “SEO content” has become a synonym for meandering “ultimate guides” and formulaic “7 ways” listicles.
Similarities between blog posts chasing the same keywords are unavoidable—there’s a core set of information that articles need to cover to match the search intent. Few content marketers ever set out to rip-off content, and if you plug these copycat articles into a plagiarism detection tool like Copy cape, chances are they won’t set off any alarms.
But there’s a deeper problem here.
In chasing search traffic, companies are sleepwalking into intellectual plagiarism. They’re fixating on their keyword research tools and SEO briefs at the expense of originality and personality. They’re curating other people’s work, instead of creating their own. They’re choosing to make content longer, instead of better.
"Content without SEO is like a car with no gas; it can't go anywhere." - Unknown
"SEO is not just about keywords; it's about understanding user intent." - Danny Sullivan
"The best SEO strategy is to make sure search engines can understand your content, not trick them into ranking it." - Wil Reynolds
"Success in SEO is about creating valuable, shareable content that people want to engage with." - David Amerland
"SEO is not a one-time task; it's an ongoing commitment to improving your online presence." - Bruce Clay
"SEO is no longer just about manipulating algorithms; it's about delivering a great user experience." - Rand Fishkin
"Don't optimize for search engines; optimize for humans." - Kathy Sierra
"In SEO, it's not about what you do; it's about what you do differently." - Unknown
"The best SEOs are those who can adapt and evolve with the ever-changing digital landscape." - Barry Schwartz
"SEO is not just about being found; it's about providing value and relevance." - Unknown
"The best way to succeed in SEO is to be genuinely helpful." - Neil Patel
"Think of SEO as a puzzle and content as the pieces. You need both to see the full picture." - Michael King
"SEO is an investment, not a cost." - Unknown
"SEO is not about fooling Google; it's about making your website better for users." - Phil Frost
"SEO is a never-ending process. It's like a shark; it has to constantly move forward or it dies." - Brian Clark
"Content without SEO is like a car with no gas; it can't go anywhere." - Unknown
"SEO is not just about keywords; it's about understanding user intent." - Danny Sullivan
"The best SEO strategy is to make sure search engines can understand your content, not trick them into ranking it." - Wil Reynolds
"Success in SEO is about creating valuable, shareable content that people want to engage with." - David Amerland
"SEO is not a one-time task; it's an ongoing commitment to improving your online presence." - Bruce Clay
"SEO is no longer just about manipulating algorithms; it's about delivering a great user experience." - Rand Fishkin
"Don't optimize for search engines; optimize for humans." - Kathy Sierra
"In SEO, it's not about what you do; it's about what you do differently." - Unknown
"The best SEOs are those who can adapt and evolve with the ever-changing digital landscape." - Barry Schwartz
1. SEO Content Needs a Human Touch
Tools like Clearscope, Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush are the right-hand of every content marketer and SEO practitioner, but problems arise when we over-rely on those tools.
SEO tools have a very particular data set at their disposal: the existing search results. When their input consists entirely of existing articles, we shouldn’t be surprised when their output looks like those articles. After all, they’re designed to highlight the topics and keywords common between the top-ranking articles (articles A, B and C, below), and recommend a new article structure that’s a consolidation of all three (article ABC).
Instead of collating content, we can create something completely original. Instead of wrapping articles A, B and C into a lazy “Ultimate Guide,” we can create something completely original, with new data or a new perspective (article D).
2. Length Isn’t the Only Differentiator
Longer content generally performs better—up to a point. Today, SERPs are so crowded with 10,000-word articles that long-form content is no longer an effective differentiator.
There was a time when “skyscraper” content—creating an article longer and more comprehensive than its competitors—was smart play. It was convenient for the reader: instead of clicking through a dozen articles, they could read a single definitive guide. It helped with SEO too, since longer articles can rank for more keywords, drive more traffic and often acquire more backlinks.
But skyscraper content is no longer a niche tactic. Everyone does it. It’s become the de facto strategy for unseating incumbent articles, and it’s created an arms race. In the past five years, average blog post length has increased by 42%, from 808-words to 1,151-words. When you compete solely on length, articles become bloated and unwieldy, and it’s the reader that loses out.
Length is only one way of competing with existing content. Arguably, it’s also the worst. Instead, choose a better dimension of differentiation:
Data: What unique data do you, and only you, have access to? Product usage stats, surveying your audience, you name it. If your company lacks proprietary data, is there a unique meta-analysis of existing data you can create?
Opinion: If you have a good grounding in a topic, you're uniquely positioned to offer a contrarian perspective. Which "best practices" are wrong? What mistakes do you commonly encounter? What will change in the next year?
Experience: What lived experience can you share on a topic? Your experiences can't be emulated by other people—anchoring your article in a real-world story provides a novel dimension for even the most tiring topics.
Network: What lived experience can people within your network share? If you're networked with well-known brands and people, all the better—you have additional non-search distribution built-in.
Expertise: What are you uniquely good at? What "expert" insight can you offer that other content marketers can't? Draw upon your personal interests, qualifications and education.
Instead of relying on other people’s hard-earned work, great search content brings something new to the table—harnessing the skills and perspectives that that company, and only that company, can provide.
3. Great Content Requires Experimentation
The surest way to rank a target keyword is to copy the existing content. After all, you’re using a proven format. The article you’re emulating already ranks for your target keyword. Crucially though, this “low risk” content offers low rewards.
Most SEO content is a commodity. It offers useful information, but it’s provided without context or perspective—it looks and feels like every other article out there. It might rank for a bunch of keywords, but what use is it if no-one remembers your brand, or becomes a customer?
Over time, the situation looks bleaker. As copycat content becomes less interesting and more commonplace, it becomes high risk and low reward. Readers get bored of the same tired old format. Once interesting brands become more and more homogeneous. Search engines get better and better at extracting information from “ultimate guide” style articles and surfacing it directly in the search results—stifling your traffic in the process.
Combating Copycat Content
Writing copycat content yields, at best, small improvements over the existing search results. We’re not adding anything new, just collating existing information into one place. As content marketers, we shouldn’t settle for that.
