One of the most important parts of SEO is content; well-written, SEO-optimized content is key to ranking high in search engines and bringing your audience to the website.

A long time ago, it was common practice to copy something over from a competitor or a similar website, adjust it a bit, and be done with it. Another common practice was to create templated content for several similar pages and change the names/locations/features of the item/location/service so that it is not a 100% match to the others.

This creates duplicate content, which Google does not like and does not rank very high in their search results (usually – I’ve seen exceptions). If you copy content over from a competitor, that’s a problem, and it’s the same if you use the same content (or most of it) in your website on different pages repeatedly. That’s why quality content writers are very sought-after nowadays.

I know I’ve had a tough time finding our current content manager and some of our current writers. It is difficult to keep them focused so that they always double-check their work, fix “nonsense” before it gets sent over for publishing, and most of all, ensure that they always deliver original, quality content.

Sometimes, content writers try to cut corners or have repetitive writing patterns that they include in everything they create, which can be a bad signal to search engines. It’s a good idea to check your content for plagiarism before it is published on the website. Many tools can help you do that, some of them even free, and it only takes a couple of minutes to test a page, whereas a duplicate page will waste lots of work and money because it won’t rank well and it can even hurt the rest of your site.