Are You Sure Your Website Has Unique Content?

What would you do if you found out that the same blog on your website is also on your competitor’s website, word for word, and your website doesn’t have unique content? This can sound a bit crazy, especially if you’ve signed up with a large marketing agency that is putting blogs, client information, or newsletters out for all your clients and subscribers to see. However, what would your clients think if they got the same newsletter from many different companies?

This is not a “what if”. This is something our experts at Burning Ox Marketing came across, and we’re surprised it’s happening. Unfortunately, small business owners see the opportunity to get professional yet inexpensive content for their site, but they never ask if it is unique content or literally copied across many sites.

Unique content isn’t just something that sounds great or is only for niche businesses. Unique content is what helps businesses rank on search engines like Google, get cited by AI tools, and keep customer trust. Without one-of-a-kind content only on your site, your website may be hurting your business more than it’s helping. We’ll look at what business owners know, what gives content value, how search engines react to AI content, and more.

Most problems with unique content start when a marketing agency contacts a business owner and sells them a content package. What business owners hear is that this agency will place professional, researched, and professionally-written content on their site, and visitors will look at it and think that their business is the best. However, that same content package is being sold to hundreds of businesses, some in the same city as your business, and shows up at the same time on multiple websites. Now, think of that same blog being posted on competitors’ sites all over the United States, Australia, England, and more.

Upon digging, you discover that all of the “amazing” content produced by this inexpensive yet well-known marketing agency is all set to “noindex”. Noindex is code on the non-visible part of your website, telling crawlers like Google not to show this page in search results. So, the blog posts that you paid for won’t be found, won’t rank, and is basically invisible anywhere outside of your website. That’s a problem.

We’ve said this many times: content is king online. However, if it’s the same content found everywhere, it isn’t telling your customers anything new and therefore won’t drive organic search visibility. Your content won’t be found when customers use AI tools for search, and the online credibility of your business will fall. Marketing is all about delivering value to the customer, but if you’re delivering the same value as everyone else, you won’t stand out and will ultimately be forgotten.

So what constitutes unique content? Can business owners just find information on another site and just rephrase it? When we talk about unique content, it is original information created by the business owner (or writer hired by the business owner), and the company has complete ownership of that content. In essence, that content does not live, appear, or exist anywhere else. By definition, this already excludes content written by AI.

Too often, business owners know that content is important and think that dumping a lot of content onto the site is the answer. However, there is a limit to how many blogs is a good amount for your website. Crawlers used by Google only have so much time to look over a site, so diluting unique content with fluff doesn’t help.

For unique content to be effective, it needs to be created to target your audience, be for your brand, and the target market. When the words are put to paper, the organization of the words and the tone of voice need to reflect the professionalism of your company. The purpose of the content is to help answer the questions that your customers have. Only you know what your clients need to hear because they’re yours and no one else’s.

Now put yourself in your client’s shoes. First, whenever people are looking for a new provider, product, or service, they’ll shop around. It’s common for those who don’t know much about the company or service to sign up for newsletters and read those blogs. Now, what happens when they sign up for newsletters on multiple sites and they send the same newsletter?

When they read up on the latest trends and information on your site and your competitor’s website, and they see the same information, they might think, “Did this company steal this information from that other site I just looked at?” Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. If potential customers lose their trust in your company before contacting you for the first time, you’re likely to never hear from them again.

With all the content available online, AI content generation has made it even more difficult for search engines to quickly index high-quality content. So, as part of the AI wave, Google has purchased Reddit to teach its crawlers to detect and flag AI content. When the content is flagged, it is pushed down in search results, and confidence in its accuracy and legitimacy lowers.

As a note, AI content isn’t actually created from nothing. Responses from AI tools use their vast knowledge from the snapshot of content it has, and look for patterns. So, the “generated” content is nothing but a bunch of patterns of already existing content. So, now more than ever, internet users are showing that they value authenticity and originality over sheer volume.

Another framework used by search engines like Google is E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Let’s look at the “expertise” part of it. Being an expert means knowing more about a topic or subject than most others. However, if everyone has access to the same information and says the same information on their own website, then everyone becomes an “expert,” which means no one is.

Google also heavily penalizes content that is duplicated or plagiarized. If every website is saying the same thing, then Google looks to find the source of truth and uses that information when citing in AI, ranks that content higher in search results, and all of the copycats are flagged and lowered in rankings.

Admittedly, this blog wasn’t originally planned to be written. However, as we saw at blog after blog for Chiropractors, we found three major marketing companies were doing the same thing. These companies sign on clients who want to have blogs put on their websites and newsletters sent to their customers, but they are the same.

What they copied and pasted was:

• The posting date
• Same main image
• Duplicated headline
• Same content

As we dug deeper, we found that the content was “noindexed” and actually copyrighted to the marketing company, not the client. In order not to lean on what others say and create our own unique content, we manually reviewed 50 websites that had the same blog.

What we found surprised us:

1. Competitors in the same market had the same blogs.
2. None of the blogs were ranking on Google.
3. The blogs were not being cited or even mentioned in AI tools.
4. The same content was appearing in different countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Ethically, marketing agencies shouldn’t be helping competitors who are trying to attract the same clients. It’s a conflict of interest. As an example, 23.6% of Nebraska and 13.93% of Arizona websites use these providers. Those are just the ones that we’ve confirmed so far. So, make sure the content marketing services you pay for give you unique content.

We’ve gone over what not to do. Now, let’s go over some bullet points of what you should do to create unique content that gets you ranked and gets cited by AI tools.

• Write about what your customers or target audience wants to read. Don’t just write for the sake of checking a box or filling a gap.
• Keep the information targeted and relevant. If you’re a small business owner, speak about the metro you’re in and details only a local would know.
• Write about what you’ve gone through as a business owner. Talk about job experiences, client success stories, and case studies.
• When it comes to content, consistency is key. If you’re not creative, strive to do a minimum of one blog post a month that is at least 1,000 words long.
• Have an easy-to-understand blog structure so people can read the sections they want and understand the flow of the information.
• Make sure it’s unique content, and you own it. You don’t want your blogs to disappear once a marketing contract expires.
• Before posting, it’s always a good idea to run your content to check for AI and plagiarism.

By making sure you have unique content that you own and that your clients want to hear, you guarantee that you’re not just paying to rent a copy of information that has to be returned like a Blockbuster Video or temporary access from Prime Video.

TL;DR – Many small business owners don’t know they’re paying for copied content that Google doesn’t rank and customers don’t trust. Unique content that is locally relevant and owned by the company builds trust, helps rank, and drives online leads.

Now that you know what to look out for,  you need to audit your content and see if you own it. If you need help creating content that is owned by you, need help with a content audit, or need help starting your journey in creating unique content for your unique brand, contact the professionals at Burning Ox Marketing so we can help your website grow.