Are your products supplied by other people?
Drop-shippers, franchisees and ecommerce businesses occasionally suffer from duplicate content issues. If your supplier provides you with ready made product descriptions and information, that’s great. It’s useful to have a starting point. The thing is, search engines don’t like duplicate content.
Website content should always be unique
Because human searchers deserve variety, search engines prefer website content to be unique. If you copy stuff from elsewhere and bung it on your site – or put the same stuff on more than one site – you could even get banned.
There’s free software that checks pages for duplicate copy. Or do a quick ‘n’ dirty. Just copy and paste a chunk of words into Google’s, Yahoo’s, Bing’s and Ask’s search boxes and see if they pop up anywhere else. If they don’t appear on page one of the search results you should be OK.
If your site’s packed with duplicate content the best thing to do is to get it edited by a good copywriter. Why? Because:
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A clever, creative edit will make your site unique
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It’ll have it’s own recognisable, consistent tone of voice. Together with your design that’s the beginnings of a brand
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Search engines will like it and it’ll help site visibility
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Site visitors will appreciate and enjoy it
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It’ll have a strong focus on response and sales
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Your grammar and spelling will be spot on
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It can be adjusted to suit your target market
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It will include intelligent use of key words and key phrases
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It will entertain, inform and inspire!
