Copying a Competitor's Layout

What you are actually looking at

A competitor's site that appears to work is the visible half of something.

The invisible half is their reputation, their reviews, their photographs, their years in the area, and the fact that half their visitors already knew the name.

Copying the layout transfers the visible half and none of the rest.

Which is why a site that looks like theirs frequently performs like your old one.

You do not know that it works

The assumption underneath the whole exercise, and it is usually unfounded.

You can see their site and you cannot see their enquiries, their conversion rate, or whether the site is producing anything at all.

A busy competitor may be busy despite the site, on referrals and reputation, with the site contributing very little.

Businesses regularly copy a site that its own owner is unhappy with.

Before copying anything, consider that the only evidence you have is that they are visible, which is a different thing.

What genuinely transfers

• The order they answer questions in.
• What they put on the first screen.
• Which objections they address.
• What they publish a price for.
• How they ask for the enquiry.
• What they leave out.

Those are decisions rather than appearance, and they are transferable because they reflect what customers in your trade need to know. The last is the most instructive and the least examined.

Look at several, not one

Since one competitor is an anecdote.

Open six sites in your trade and note what all of them do, what most do, and what only one does.

The things everybody does are conventions your customers expect, and departing from them costs you unless you have a reason.

The things only one does are experiments, and you have no idea whether they worked.

What you want is the middle: the practices common enough to be deliberate and not universal, which is where the judgement is.

An hour with six sites and a notepad is worth more than a month copying one.

A worked example

A business rebuilt their site closely on a competitor's, matching the structure, the section order, and the general appearance.

Enquiries did not move.

Comparing the two afterwards, the competitor's site had ninety reviews visible, photographs of forty completed jobs, prices on every service, and named staff with photographs.

The copy had the same layout with four stock photographs, no prices, and no reviews.

The layout had never been the thing doing the work, and the elements that were doing it had taken the competitor eight years to accumulate.

They spent the following year on reviews and photographs, on the layout they already had, and enquiries improved.

Copy the questions, not the answers

The reframing that makes this useful.

Note which questions their pages answer, in what order, and then answer those questions with your own figures, your own examples, and your own limits.

That produces a page shaped by what customers need to know and filled with what only you can say.

It is also the version that outperforms the original, since their answers are generic to them and yours are specific to you.

Where they answer a question you cannot, that is a gap worth knowing about rather than a paragraph to imitate.

Where copying is a genuine risk

Briefly, since it happens.

Copying text is a straightforward legal problem, and it is detected easily by anybody who looks.

Copying photographs is worse, since it uses images of somebody else's work to represent yours.

Copying a distinctive visual identity, where a customer might confuse the two businesses, creates a different kind of problem in a small market.

Layout conventions and structure are not the issue here, since those are shared across every site in most trades.

The line is roughly between how information is arranged and what the information actually is.

The reputational half

Worth considering in a small market.

Competitors notice, customers occasionally notice, and in a trade where everybody knows everybody it is remembered.

A site closely resembling the largest firm in the area also reads as an imitation of them, which positions you as the lesser version.

That is the opposite of what the exercise was for.

Taking the structure and looking different is both safer and more effective.

Look outside your trade as well

Since six sites in the same trade share the same blind spots.

If every plumber's site buries the price, studying six of them produces a conclusion that burying the price is normal rather than that it is a weakness.

Look at two or three trades adjacent to yours where the buying decision is similar, and note what they do that nobody in yours does.

That is where an actual advantage comes from, since matching your own trade's conventions makes you equal to it at best.

The things worth borrowing are usually ordinary elsewhere and absent in your sector, which is exactly why they are available.

Save what you looked at

Since this exercise is worth repeating and reconstructing it from memory is not possible.

Take a screenshot of each site's home page and main service page, dated, and keep them in one folder.

A year later those show what changed: who added prices, who started publishing reviews, who rebuilt entirely.

That tells you what is moving in your market, which is more useful than any single snapshot including the one you are taking today.

It also settles arguments about whether a competitor has always done something or added it recently, which is otherwise unanswerable.

The counter-case

Learning from competitors is entirely reasonable.

Conventions exist because they work, and inventing a novel navigation pattern to avoid resembling anybody is a worse mistake than resembling somebody.

For a business with no site and no idea where to start, a good competitor site is a reasonable model and considerably better than a blank page.

And most of what makes sites in a trade look similar is that customers in that trade want the same things.

Study six, copy the decisions, supply your own specifics, and look different.

What to do

1. Open six competitor sites.
2. Note what all of them do.
3. Note what only one does.
4. List the questions their pages answer.
5. Answer those with your own figures.
6. Look for what they have that you do not.
7. Never copy text or photographs.

Step six is the finding that usually matters, since the difference is generally reviews, photographs, and prices rather than anything about the arrangement.

The honest way to compare yourself is covered in comparing yourself to a competitor fairly.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.