Unique Content
In German, unique content means “unique content” – and that is exactly what makes such content unique: It is unique, individually adapted to the respective context and, at best, of high quality. With these characteristics, unique content acts entirely in the sense of content marketing, which is extremely relevant to SEO. Those who play out irrelevant content on a website risk not only quickly bouncing readers and thus a poor our experience, but also direct penalties from the major search engines.
Content Marketing Agency
In order to be able to present your users with better search results, Google and Co. are constantly making updates which, among other things, make exactly that possible. At the heart of this – as with all search processes – are special algorithms. These algorithms contain, among other things, the standards that determine what is allowed and what is not, and which SEO activities are particularly beneficial to the ranking and which are less so. At the latest since the so-called Panda Update by the search engine leader Google, the importance of good content and the requirements for good texts have risen sharply. Those who operate pages that are devoid of information and focused purely on keywords risk a downgrade in the ranking or, in the worst case, even expulsion from the index. The use of undoubted plagiarism in particular increases the risk of massive penalties. In addition, a very high proportion of advertising or affiliate links can also have a negative effect.
Unique content can be described as the direct opposite of duplicate content. Duplicate content is content that appears in identical form on several pages on the web. However, this is not only a matter of copied texts, i.e. plagiarism, but also of largely identical individual pages or page sections of one and the same website operator. Duplicate content is divided into internal and external duplicate content. Internal duplicate content refers to identical content on one domain and external duplicate content refers to corresponding content on several domains.
Duplicate content is an important issue for the major search engines. On the one hand, duplicate content makes it difficult for them to algorithmically find out which pages of one or more domains best match a search query. On the other hand, they want to save crawling resources as much as possible and not have to index umpteen versions of the same page. In fact, the latter means immense costs in the scales of the most relevant search engines, which have to be spent on hardware performance, among other things.
In order not to run the risk of being affected in any way by negative effects, you can make use of various tools that help you quickly and easily to identify duplicate content that may be present on your websites. One of the simplest, but at the same time most informative helpers is Copyscape. It is best to avoid duplicate content from the outset – in other words, to prevent it from arising in the first place.
However, there is also duplicate content that has real added value for your customers and could therefore in principle even have a positive SEO influence. This category includes URLs with sorting or product variants or affiliate URLs. There is a solution for such pages so that they are not penalised as duplicate content – the so-called canonical link.
This is a link in the head of the respective page that is not visible to your customers. This shows the search engines exactly which page should appear as a reference in the results. Through the canonical link, the algorithms of the search engines understand both URLs as one content and can quickly classify them correctly.
In the case of duplicate content that should not appear in any version in the index – for example in the context of very similar distribution pages that are used exclusively for navigation – it is usually appropriate to set the robots meta tag to “noindex, follow”. This results in a complete exclusion from the search engines. Before you choose this option, however, question the necessity for the existence of the corresponding pages and – if possible – switch them off completely.
Duplicate or even multiple content that should appear individually on different pages in the SERPs and bring SEO success must be turned into unique content. Even if all your services are identical and are only offered in the smallest variations, the following applies: If you want your services to be separately findable and this content should not bear the risk of being penalised with regard to duplicate content, you must formulate separate texts for each of them.
Text length
The factors to be paid particular attention to in order to achieve perfect SEO content have been the subject of heated debate for years. One of the central points of friction here is the length of the text. So how long does a text have to be in order to achieve maximum SEO success? The most generally applicable answer is unfortunately very vague. It actually depends on the respective query in the search engine. Simple requests in the form of voice searches are already answered by Google and Co. directly in the SERPs. But even to be considered there, it is necessary to provide appropriately targeted content. In this context, however, the question is rather: How long may the text be? And not: How long does the text have to be?
In an analysis of one million search results, the Backlinko agency obtained very valuable insights regarding the most beneficial text lengths. There seems to be a direct correlation between text length and ranking. On average, the articles ranking in the first to third positions are significantly longer than those in the lower positions.
Pages in the first positions have an average length of 1890 words. So if your company operates in a highly competitive (online/SEO) market, you will probably have to provide quite detailed and in-depth essays on your business area or the goods or services you sell in order to be as relevant as possible to search engines in terms of content. As a rule, niche companies have it much easier here, since they do not have to assert themselves on Google and Co. against a large, perhaps very strong SEO- and content-marketing-driven competition.
It is always difficult or impossible to make general statements in the context of SEO. However, you can find out relatively easily for yourself how long an article should be:
Use a search engine yourself and see how long the top-ranked texts in your business area are. If they all present themselves in a short and crisp manner, you do not have to – and sometimes may not – deliver “detailed scientific elaborations” in order to rank well.
If the articles positioned at the top are very long and those in the first position are the longest, the text length will probably play a greater role. On the other hand, if the answers tend to be short – for example, in the case of more or less simple data queries – no one will probably expect long texts – not even the search engines.
Longer articles – as long as the context fits – practically always have one big advantage: they create more chances to rank for other relevant search terms that relate to the topic. So it is actually possible to cover hundreds of different search queries in a topic area more or less unconsciously with one long article. For longer articles, the number of potential rankings and the associated reach therefore sometimes increase enormously.
However, you should never try to artificially inflate a text with regard to this preference. Long articles with a thin added value or insufficient focus will hardly be accepted by your customers as desired. The bounce rate increases and this in turn leads the search engines to conclude that the user experience is poor.
Incidentally, a misunderstanding can quickly arise when interpreting the appropriate text length: The word count of the entire page must always be considered and not just the word count of the article in question. This means that the navigation, any page lines, the footer and all other text-containing elements should also be included. Take the resulting value as the basis for your SEO content.