The old adage that content is king does have more than just a grain of truth to it. Anyone involved in SEO (search engine optimisation) will tell you that one important factor in gaining good results in any search engine is having high-quality, original (and unique) content. There are two key terms: high-quality and original/unique. I’ll cover what I mean by that and why exactly those two points are important for anyone with a website.

High-Quality Content mediocre copy kills conversions

We often provide our customers with this simple analogy for what their website is: your website is like a brochure. It contains all the important details about your business, wrapped up in a (hopefully!) nicely formatted design. What good is a brochure which is riddled with poor grammar, spelling or sentence structure? The answer? Very, very little. A company site that is filled with basic errors and provides little informative or useful content will only serve to ward off potential customers.

Unique and Original verbatim copying is both plagiarism and dangerous

You don’t only run the risk of legal retaliatory action, but when you copy text from another site on the Internet you can almost expect a backlash from Google. The search engine (and probably most others) doesn’t look kindly on duplicate content. Content which is signficantly duplicated/copied/stolen from another site - or even content which is duplicated within your site.

Your site is going to be of significantly less interest to people if it contains portions which are reused or recycled. Invest the time to write original pieces which are going to capture the attention of your visitors and search engines or risk being ignored.