Creating Unique Content

With the prominence of social media sharing as a link building technique, creating unique and informative content is now a huge part of SEO strategy.

It’s all very well creating a unique article or blog post for your site, but what then? How are you going to get people to actually see and share it? We have put together our top tips on creating and sharing unique content for any SEO campaign.

Make Sure Your Content is Original

Don’t just find any old article that outlines what you want to say and copy it. Although your article will be unique in terms of wording, the actual theme or topic of the article won’t be. If you’re sharing this content with other likeminded people on Facebook or Twitter, they’re probably going to have read a very similar article from other SEOs that they’re following and won’t bother reading yours. This isn’t informative content, and in this sense, it’s not unique.

Don’t be afraid to voice your opinions. Think about the ultimate goal of this article; you want it to drive traffic back to your site so that you gain business. Potential clients may not be interested in a purely factual article; they want to know that the person writing it knows what they’re talking about and has their own opinions as to what works in SEO. Take SEOmoz for example, their Whiteboard Friday videos are a really useful tool for anyone learning the SEO business. I personally trust their advice with regards to SEO strategy because they’re not afraid to give their opinions or share what has and hasn’t worked for them in the past. If I was a potential client, I would feel assured that this honesty and experience would translate through to their work to get me the best results for my business.

Don’t try and Sell

Articles should be informative, useful or even humorous. People are only going to share your content if it is actually useful and interesting for them. Humorous content works really well to get shared; even if it’s just one funny image with your website URL in the corner, people are likely to post this on their facebook wall or re-tweet it on Twitter. The same works with infographics and interactive content; unique content doesn’t always need to be a long article. It does however, need to get people’s attention and, depending on the nature of the content, solve a problem or share experiences.

Don’t use this to sell, no one is going to share a huge sales pitch! It’s not informative and doesn’t help them in any way.

Be Consistent

This is particularly significant for social media sharing. There is no point posting one really useful article and then dropping off the face of the earth. Be consistent with your posts and use social media as it was originally intended.

You don’t always have to be posting unique content in terms of articles or infographics, update your status at least once a day so people can see that you’re still active and are around to answer any queries or enquiries they may have. Unique content can be anything that gets you noticed; if you name is popping up on Twitter or Facebook consistently then people are going to remember you.

If you meet with a potential client, post about it on Twitter and include their name in the post. Chances are, they’ll either re-tweet your post or start following you, and there you have it; a whole new audience to target.

When creating unique content, you need to try and put yourself in a potential client’s shoes. What will be useful to them? What might they find funny? What is a common and relevant problem that you could give advice on?

OK, I agree that creating unique content does take time, but the face of link building is shifting tremendously towards social media so you need to get on board. Remember, it could only take one great post to make all the difference.