If you could just steal food and a massive telly from the shops, instead of having to work to earn money to buy them, life would be much easier, wouldn’t it? Similarly, content marketing would be a piece of cake if, instead of writing unique content, you could just lift big chunks of text from your competitors and plant them into your blog posts.
But, ignoring the moral dilemma at the heart of this scenario, the web would also be a really boring place, full of all the same stuff. Yawnsville! You need original content. Not only to keep your visitors interested and give them something they can’t get anywhere else, but also to appease the ever-watchful Google bot.
Why is unique content so important?
From a ranking point of view, Google doesn’t like plagiarised content. Hates it, in fact. If the Google bot thinks you’re trying to pull the wool over its eyes with copied content, it will become angered. You’ll find your position in the search engine results pages drops massively. And your site could even be removed from the Google index completely, which means you won’t feature in the SERPS at all. Yikes!
Google’s advice? “You should provide content that gives your users a reason to visit and return to your site. When you create content, it’s important to ask yourself if it provides substantial value and originality when compared to other sites covering similar subjects, as this will attract more visitors.”
From a visitor’s point of view, if you don’t have original content, then what do you have? Research shows that a whopping 96% of people who visit websites aren’t ready to convert. And so at this stage, your unique products, services, and pricing structures aren’t enough. You need to be able to give these visitors something that your competitors can’t. And that something is your original voice.
How does WordHound guarantee originality?
We think originality is a big deal. That’s why we take no chances. We use two different ways to make sure that absolutely everything we deliver to our clients is not only top-notch, but totally unique:
1. We use Copyscape Premium
You’ve probably heard of Copyscape. It’s the best-known plagiarism detection tool out there. Everything that our writers produce gets run through Copyscape Premium, which can pick up on even the tiniest copy-and-paste crime. But not everything will get a perfect score, and sometimes, that’s OK. For example, the quote above (from Google) sets Copyscape’s whiskers a-twitching, as it almost always will with quotes.
Run this very piece through Copyscape, and you’ll find that it’s 8% copied, purely because of that quote. We’re not worried. We encourage our writers to back up their facts, figures, and ideas with quotes from industry leaders in your field, giving your content greater authority. And if your article comes up with anything more than a 0% Copyscape score (it’ll almost always be for a quote), we’ll tell you.
2. We use great writers
Although we use Copyscape Premium, we rarely find ourselves setting its big red flashing alarm off. It’s simply our second line of defence. We’re pretty strict on only working with writers that we trust completely, and we’ve worked with many of them for years.
We have total confidence in our writers’ ability to tell a unique story. We also know that they want to tell an original story. Our writers hate plagiarised content as much as we do.
So getting back to our initial question, how will you know you have unique content?
You’ll know your content is unique because WordHound is built on the knowledge that originality is essential, as well as a vague feeling that theft is probably bad. If you need more than just our word, your Copyscape score will give you total peace of mind that your content is one of a kind.
