Imitation is underappreciated in today’s business world (and, as we'll later see, in SEO). For example, did you know that:

• Coca Cola imitated RC Cola in replicating its diet cola product
• Visa and Mastercard imitated the credit card concept from Diners Club  
• McDonalds took the fast food chain concept from White Castle  

There are many more famous examples of how company's imitations actually surpassed the original innovator’s product. One study actually shows that innovators capture around 2.2% of the total value of their innovations (source). The rest 97.8% probably went to imitators (for a more detailed read of imitators vs. innovators, see this HBR article).  

I’m really glad SEOs are already understanding the value of imitation but only for competition research. There are many tools for this where you just enter the page and see who links to them. But that’s all! There aren’t many imitation strategies on keyword research or on-page SEO. What I’ll attempt to do in this article is give you some ideas on how to imitate successfully on these 2 sub-fields of SEO. I also hope we'll start a discussion where everyone can contribute and share his or her imitation strategies in the comments.

Keyword Research – Use The Wisdom of EzineArticles Crowds  

This recent YOUmoz post on using YouTube as a Keyword Research Tool was a great inspiration to me for this idea. The YOUmoz post was about seeing the keywords people use in YouTube comments for videos on your topic and then entering those into the Google Keyword tool to get new keywords ideas. So I thought: “Hey, you can also do this with EzineArticles and find amazing keyword ideas!"  

The thing is, people who write on EzineArticles are usually trying to rank for long tail keywords. They usually put their keywords in the title. The content on EzineArticles is usually junk to be honest (and we won't bother looking at it much), A friend once had a popular free people search article (popular because it got 140k+ views from StumbleUpon) getting re-written multiple times, many authors blatantly re-write popular content without giving credit. But we don't care about the content, we care only about the title.  

How to get started: Type “keyword site:ezinearticles.com” (without the quotation marks). For example, here is what happens when I type “learn spanish site:ezinearticles.com”:  

Wow! With each result, I got 1 unique medium or long-tail keyword I can use (quick ways to learn Spanish, learn Spanish at home, learn Spanish computer software etc). For even more unique keyword ideas, try searching for results in the past week or month (you can select that option in Google search under “More search tools” on the left). Let's try this trick for 'learn SEO' and see the results for the past month :

In a few seconds we got a bunch of highly related keywords. That's the power of EzineArticles crowdsourcing. :)  

Competitor’s Links – If they’re Commenting on a High-Profile Blog, They Must be Doing the Same for Other High-Profile Blogs  

My experience shows this. People commenting on do-follow PR7+ (yeah, I know PR doesn’t matter so much, just an example) blogs are probably commenting on other do-follow PR6-7 blogs as well. Same with forums and other types of platforms.  

So what can you do to make use of this? Take their root domain and enter in into Open Site Explorer and select “links from external pages only” and “to all pages of the root domain”. You can also select “Followed+301” if you want. Then sort by domain authority. This is pain in the a** to do manually every time, so I figured a way to do it semi-automatically.  

The URL format for showing external links to all pages on the root domain sorted by domain authority is:   www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.domain.com/a!links!!filter!all!!source!external!!target!domain  

The lesson: Instead of selecting the 3 options each time you search, you can add a!links!!filter!all!!source!external!!target!domain at the end of the URL. If you know a faster way to do this, let me know.  

This has been a powerful imitation method for me because I was able to find  a bunch of easy-to-get links from authority domains.

Discover Similar Keywords Where Your Competitors Rank For 

Targeting a single keyword is an inefficient strategy these days if you ask me. Google have started to really understand how language works and understanding user intention. Many pages, if they rank for 1 keyword, probably rank for 2-3 more similar keywords (that usually have a similar search volume) as well.   

Let’s take our ‘learn Spanish’ example and try to see for what other keywords is the #1 page ranking for using SemRush:   

“spanish” = #4  

“how to learn spanish, “learn spanish online” = #1  

“spanish'” = #4  and some other ones

All these are highly searched keywords (over 10.000 searches per month). Now, you can take these similar keywords into consideration if you plan to compete with sites for ‘learn Spanish’. The SemRush free versions allows you to see only 10 keywords for which a domain is ranking for. If anyone knows a free/better alternative that shows more results, let me know.

NOW, tell me: What are YOUR imitation strategies? :)