Website Copywriting: Generic or Custom Content?

When building a website, you have to ask your website design company, "Will the text content in the website be generic content that is duplicated on other websites or will it be custom-written for my business?" This question must also be asked regarding the copywriting in other aspects of your Internet marketing, such as blogging.

The Trouble with Duplicate Content

The phrase "duplicate content" refers to content that is in your website that is also found elsewhere on the Web. Google and the other search engines do not like duplicate content. The reason for this dislike boils down to usefulness.

Google wants to be the most useful search engine that there is out there, and judging by Google's share of the search market, most people think it is. But what would happen if people started finding that their searches yielded page after page of the same information – not just the same concepts, but literally the same text over and over again? People would be frustrated at the lack of varied content, and they might consider using Bing next time. This is Google's worst nightmare, and is why Google prunes Web pages containing duplicate content from its database of websites.

If you want your website to show up on the search engines when people are looking for your services, you absolutely need to have a website that has been constructed with custom copywriting for the Web.

Some Web design companies fill out their websites by adding generic text to various sections of your website, so press the Web design company that you're speaking with. If they say, "Yes, we will write custom content for you," ask them if that means that there will be absolutely no duplicate content on your website.

Ownership

In addition to inhibiting search engine optimization, duplicate content can cause problems when you want to switch Internet marketing companies if you don't own the copy on your website. Fully templated website designs, websites that are 100% prefabricated from the website copywriting to the basic look-and-feel and layout, are tempting to buy because they are so inexpensive when compared to custom website designs, but you usually don't own the site.

If you're not sure if your website contains duplicate content or not, feel free to give me a call or shoot me an email. I can check it out for you, and if it does, we can formulate a plan to replace it with custom copywriting.