From the negative to the positive – now that we’ve spent more than a week covering the problems caused by duplicate content, lets look at a few ways to create some unique content on your site.
Write About You
It’s your site – at some point, a visitor to the site is expecting to learn something about you. Whether it’s a detailed company history, a clinically written document or an informal introduction, let the content be created in your voice. By the time someone has read through your site they should be starting to feel like they know you, or at least have an idea of your personality.
Write Locally
Write some content about your city, your neighbourhood and local businesses. This is good for local search (which we’ll cover in a future series). It also helps your visitors gain confidence in the fact that you’re a real local business.
Blogging
Start a company blog. There are dozens of ideas for florist blogging, and we may expand on them in a future article, but here are some quick suggestions:
- Weekly product feature
- Feature local businesses
- Have your designers blog about their impressions of current trends (floral and colours / decor / etc.)
- Interesting items about your business – after all, if you can’t think of anything interesting to say about yourself, why are you in business??
You have two basic options for starting a new blog: on your domain, or hosted on a third party domain. It is very strongly recommended that you position your blog on your own site domain. Using a hosted blog option will not help you by providing new unique content on your site, and you will lose the “freshness” benefit of having new content appearing on your site regularly.
If you have to choose a hosted option both FloristBlogs.com and FlowerChat.com have florist-friendly blog options. Try to avoid common platforms like WordPress.com and Blogger/Blogspot.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging involves posting an article on someone else’s blog, or having a guest author post on your blog. Benefits include giving the audience a different voice once in a while, and gathering some incloming links. You can post on other florist’s blogs to interlink and support each other’s sites, or do guest blogging with other related but non-florist blogs to build your link profile.
User Generated Content
A great (and free!) alternative to hiring a content writer is to create venues on your site for User Generated Content. This includes comments on articles, pages and blog posts, customer testimonials, and product reviews (which is a really excellent way to help avoid filters related to using stock product descriptions!).
You can have the prettiest site in the world, but if the content is not unique it will not be of any value to your customers, it will not attract links, and will not be well and thorough indexed and ranked by the search engines.
Your article led me to realize something. In fact, I think that florists and local businesses in general (depending on the city) may have more things to talk about on their blogs. I am saying this because I think that there may be different events happening that can be exploited in blog posts.
Additionally, having the business owners’ opinion about these events could even add more personality to the blog.
If only more websites would take full advantage of user generated content! They would get more content for free, keep their readers engaged in meaningful discussions, attract new members and buyers, create buzz, attract links, etc.
Guest blogging is essential if you want to become a at the top in any industry. You need to show your face around and get links from other related websites. You also get a chance to show readers that you have a certain expertise and they might like you and want to read more from your actual site.