How to Ensure the Content on Your Website is Unique

How to find and produce unique website content

An established website content strategy is essential to making the most of your website and overall digital marketing efforts. Unique, high-quality content will attract the right users to your site and keep them interested. So how do you ensure that this type of content is part of your content strategy?

Conduct a content audit of your site

By performing a content audit, you can evaluate the content already published on your site and figure out which types of content are working, and which are not^[2]. Analyze content from blog posts, landing pages, case studies, and other existing parts of your site to determine what needs to be updated with new content, rewritten, or deleted. Perhaps you have had changes in your business. Maybe your buyer persona, or even your company name, has changed. It’s important to do a content audit to make sure that everything is accurate and relevant.

Your analysis should be both qualitative and quantitative. Try categorizing content to decide which topics you still need to cover, and evaluate key metrics such as conversion rate, traffic, and bounce rate to measure content performance.

You’ll most likely have some copy that is stale or even inaccurate. Timeliness and relevance are huge components in Google’s algorithms, so you’ll want to make sure that what you have published before still holds its relevance a few years down the road.

Survey your competition

By surveying your competition, you can accurately identify what makes your brand unique^[3]. Start by looking at what your competitors are doing and comparing their high-level topics to yours. If you find that these topics are similar, think of ways that you can differentiate yourself. Try taking a different angle by sharing different examples, statistics, and points of view. Researching your competition may also help you avoid duplicate content and plagiarism penalties.

Surveying your competition is as easy as doing a quick Google search. How are your competitors ranking? If they rank high in the SERPs, what are they doing right? And just as important, what are they doing wrong? Take the opportunity to learn from them.

You should also consider doing keyword research by running a competitive analysis to determine which keywords your competitors are ranking for that you’re not, or which ones they aren’t ranking for at all. It may be tempting to only go after the most popular keywords, but it’s important to pay attention to all of your options. 

Low competition and low search volume do not mean low value, and they can be beneficial for niche audiences and topics. Once you figure out which keywords are of value to both you and your audience, you can incorporate them into your website’s heading and body text.

Plan ahead

Creating content can take time and a lot of brain power. Come up with a content schedule that makes it easier to track progress. This schedule can align with your social media schedule as well so that you are not recreating the wheel every time. The schedule should include new content ideas, the kind of content that you want to focus on, and the location in which it will be published. 

It’s impossible to schedule all content–particularly blog posts–ahead of time, as industry trends will change and relevant, unexpected news may pop up, prompting the need for an update. However, if you can plan ahead as much as possible, you should be in good shape.

Don’t forget visual content

Modern web users have virtually limitless options when it comes to web content, and dense blocks of texts are a good way to quickly send them clicking away from your website. Written content is important, but the best content includes informative copy along with good readability and visuals to demonstrate specific points.

Examples of visual content to include can be infographics to show statistics or photos that show a user enjoying your products. It is important to strike a balance, though, as having too much visual content can make your website appear unfocused or cluttered. Use visuals to break up the written content so that your potential customer can digest the information provided more easily.

Avoid duplicate content

What exactly is duplicate content? It’s content that can be found on more than one web page, whether within your website or across the web. You’ll want to avoid content overlap within your site by removing duplicate text or pages because, as mentioned, search engines dock pages with duplicate content from their search engine result pages (SERPs). Even worse, your site can be penalized and filtered from searches altogether. You’ll have to get creative to avoid this problem, but it’s well worth protecting the integrity of your rankings.

When writing content for a webpage, make sure you’re not plagiarizing by doing a quick Google search by copying and pasting the phrase you want to review or by using a plagiarism checker. Remember that search algorithms consider originality when evaluating content for search engine rankings and that Google will remove content that violates its Webmaster Guidelines^[4]. 

Reuse content when appropriate

Something to note is the difference between duplicating and recycling. Consider repurposing or republishing important content topics that you have already posted. This way, you can avoid posting multiple pieces of content that present the same information over and over again, and it will save you time because you won’t need to start creating from scratch.

For example, let’s say a year ago, you wrote and posted a blog called “How To Scale Your Franchise’s Social Media Marketing.” This topic is significant to your company and your audience, so you’d like to write about it again. Instead of writing a brand new blog that repeats the same information, consider updating the content of the existing blog with additional information, updated statistics, and new headlines. You can then republish the blog under the current date.

Don’t republish everything; only republish top-performing content. You need to wait an adequate amount of time to review your content’s performance before reposting it to determine if it’s worth republishing in the first place. This way, you can continue to produce strong results from content that you already know is valuable and performing well.

Don’t be afraid to ask for some help

As a business owner, your skills may be more managerial versus creative. So taking the time to audit, survey customers, come up with a schedule, and then actually write the content may be difficult. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Depending on the service you are using for your website, there are some great templates that can help kickstart your content.

While AI-generated content may be an option, it’s well worth hiring a content writer or agency to help with producing unique, original content. Depending on your budget and needs, these experts can help you with your content strategy, write all the content, and stay on top of it for you. If you are looking to outsource your content, check out these top-rated content marketing companies.

Create distinctive content for your company

Now that you’ve learned about some of the basic best practices and tools for you to create unique content, it’s up to you to make it work with your content strategy. Putting forward content that is unique to your brand will ultimately help you find new customers who are interested in what you have to say.

This article has been updated. It was originally published in July of 2022.